Dear Brother and Sister: I am so glad you are so happy. How

beautiful to have your heart’s desire, and to know that you will

always have it.... My hours are shorter, now, from nine to six.

Then I take long walks and talk to myself. Sometimes I pretend

that you, Nell, are with me, and we have our heart talks once

more; then I wake up.... I am lonesome, or homesick.

She was not very well, not equal to the long hours. That terrible ravage

of typhoid had told on her. By the first of the year she was in

Massillon again, always a haven in any stress. She busied herself with

the housekeeping—added to her knowledge of cookery. “I must get dressed

now, and make my bread down.”

Saint Cecilia making bread! And neat! Even for a saint; to her aunt it

seemed that she spent most of her spare time pressing her clothes.

Also, there were parties:

I had the club Wednesday eve—the girls seemed to enjoy themselves

and stayed until 10:30.

Which was verging on dissipation. There were dances, too. Especially the

Masons’ Washington’s Birthday Ball, an incident of which is still

remembered in Massillon. Aunt Emily writes:

Among the guests was a man, David Atwater by name. He must have

been seventy-five, at least. During the evening, somebody

suggested that he dance the minuet. He said he would be glad to do

it, if they could find a partner for him. No one seemed to be able

to dance it but Lillian.

We often speak of it. It was a lovely sight to see this old man,

courtly and handsome, with gray hair, and the slender, beautiful

young girl, with golden hair, perfect manner and bright, youthful

apparel, dancing the stately minuet. We called it “Winter and

Spring.”

Dorothy was at a girls’ boarding-school, in Alderson, West Virginia.

Lillian to Nell, in May: “I expect to leave here the 20th for

Springfield and then Mother and I will go to Alderson, then the three of

us will proceed to Baltimore—thence to New York—then it depends upon the

wind.”

“Upon the wind!” Again the Weaver who sits at the Loom of Circumstance

may have been slightly amused—may have reflected that this being the

year 1912, a tall, large-nosed man, in a moving-picture studio on

Fourteenth Street, New York, would have something to say in the

matter—apparently—would seem to direct, not only pictures, but numerous

human destinies.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

PART TWO

I

“MR. BIOGRAPH”

They brought Dorothy from Alderson to Baltimore, and visited their old

friends, the Meixners. One day they dropped into a “movie.” The picture

was “Lena and the Geese,” a Biograph film, and when Lena walked out on

the screen, behold it was Gladys Smith! So Gladys had fallen. At first

it was a shock, but later in the day they considered the idea of

falling, too. Especially Dorothy. Gladys was probably getting well paid

for her surrender.

They went to New York, presently, took rooms and set out to find a

theatrical engagement. Their hearts were set on Belasco. They knew that

William J. Dean—the same who, ten years earlier, had rehearsed little

Dot so strenuously—was associated with Belasco. Dean was their white

hope. They found him at the Belasco Theatre. He remembered them ... who

wouldn’t?

He took them into Mr. Belasco’s private office—a weird place, full of

statuary, all in white summer dress—introduced them, and left them

there.

Lillian and Dorothy were distinctly frightened. Each tried to propel the

other in the direction of the great man. Belasco himself used to tell

how each in turn got behind, to push the other forward, until they had

backed halfway across the room.

When the interview finally began, he told them he was putting on a fairy

play, called “The Good Little Devil,” and that Mary Pickford and Ernest

Truex were engaged for the leading rôles. Neither name was familiar to

them. Gladys Smith had become “Mary Pickford” the winter before, but

they had lost sight of all the Smith family. Belasco said further that

he needed one more fairy, and that he would engage Lillian for the part.

It was a small part, but the best he had.

Lillian was delighted, Dorothy disappointed but not discouraged. They

visited other managers, and some agencies. They decided to look up

Gladys Smith, to see what could be done in that direction. Sure enough,

the telephone book had it: “Biograph Co., 11 E. 14th St.”

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

“That’s right. What’s wanted?”

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

“Sorry—no such person here.”

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

“What picture?”

“‘Lena and the Geese.’”

“Oh, that was Mary Pickford.”

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

So that was who she was—Gladys ... so much the better. Gladys, who was

now Mary, came to the telephone, and after a brief period of wild

greetings and inquiries, arranged to have them come to the studio.

* * * * *

Lillian and Dorothy, at the top of the outer step at 11 East 14th

Street, found themselves in a wide hall, confronting a great circular

heaven-climbing stairway that ascended to the unknown. A tall man with a

large hooked nose was walking up and down, humming to himself. A boy

took in their names, and presently Mary, brighter and prettier than ever

under her new name, appeared and flung herself into their arms. The tall

man continued walking up and down, and now added some words to the tune

he was humming: “She’ll never bring them in—she’ll never bring them

in,”—a suggestion to Mary, who declined to take any such hint.

“Mr. Griffith,” she said, “these are my friends, Lillian and Dorothy

Gish. They were on the stage for years, in child parts, just as I was; I

know you’ll have something for them, here.”

David Wark Griffith, director of the Biograph Company, stopped singing,

shook hands and looked at them.

“Won’t you come in?” he said.

They found themselves in quite a large room, in a violet glare of

Cooper-Hewitt lights—weird, ghastly lights, that made living persons

look as if they were dead—had been dead for some time. At one end of the

room a group of people had assembled.

“You can begin right away,” Mr. Griffith said, “as extras. We are

arranging an ‘audience.’ You can be part of the audience.”

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

They “sat in the audience,” and then sat in it again, and again and

again, for it seemed that Mr. Biograph Griffith was not satisfied with

just doing a thing once, and made you do it over and over until he was

sure it could not be any better, even if he had to keep you at it most

of the night.

Lillian and Dorothy got five dollars each, for that day, and felt very

proud of it. Dorothy especially. She had a grown-up feeling. Five

dollars a day—a real job. But, alas, early next morning Lillian took her

to a department store, and when the saleslady appeared, said:

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

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

on sixteen.”

That day they had their first parts as regulars. At the studio, Griffith

said he would rehearse them a little. He took them upstairs, and chased

them here and there about a room, firing off a revolver. It seemed

unusual, but did not alarm them. They had been through too much

rehearsing, for that. Griffith wanted to see how they reacted under

fire. “All right,” he said when they came down, “but they don’t know

what it’s all about.” The picture he was making was “The Unseen Enemy.”

At the climax, two sisters are trying to telephone for the police, while

burglars in the next room are firing at them through a stove-pipe hole.

Lillian and Dorothy must have given a good account of themselves, for

they were at the studio daily, after that, absorbing a new technique.

They had no parts to learn. Mr. Griffith stood by the camera man and

told them what to do. Just what to do. Every minute. That was altogether

a novelty. On the stage you had to learn your part before you began. If

you forgot your lines, a prompter helped you out, but he didn’t tell you

what to do ... never shouted at you, like Mr. Griffith, who on the whole

was kindly ... even amusing. He tied red and blue hair-ribbons on them,

to tell them apart, though the resemblance was not striking ... a

fleeting thing ... momentary. Lillian was “blue,” Dorothy “red,” because

he said she was the spunky one ... would talk back. Anyway, it was

easier to call out directions to “Blue” and “Red.” They got in three

days on their first picture, and an extra night. Eighteen dollars

apiece. That was riches. They lived in furnished rooms, at 424 Central

Park, West.

[Illustration: DAVID WARK GRIFFITH]

II

GRIFFITH’S GROUP OF PLAYERS

The “silent drama” had gone a good way by 1912, but had still a good way

to go. There was not much yet in the way of “sets,” elaborate

construction of scenic effects. Griffith had invented, or perfected, the

“fade-out,” the “cut-back” and other devices still in common use, but he

had built no castles or walled cities, no Bethulias or Babylons, had

marshaled no battling armies. The Fourteenth Street studio was just a

room, where one rigged up, as simply and inexpensively as possible, the

hastily knocked together properties required at the moment. The costume

wardrobe was notable for its scantiness—a collection to be picked over

hopefully, and “made to do,” or supplemented from a costumer’s. Griffith

had a curious old collector-man, always on the look-out for “good

things,” which were not always convincing. Too often the players had the

appearance of being “dressed up” in whatever they happened to have,

which was precisely the fact. It did not matter. Neither the public nor

the producers took the “movies” very seriously, as yet ... nor would

they, for a year or so to come. They were still a cheap form of

entertainment; something to be seen for ten or fifteen cents—even in the

nickelodeons. The French were doing it better, then. Some of their

films, their farces especially, were very good—light, chic—they were

miles ahead of us in costume, scenario, settings, everything, until it

became a question of money ... ah, there we had them. And then the War

came.

But I digress—an ancient sin. This is not a history of the motion

picture, but only the story of a little girl, who grew up in a kind of

dream ... a land of make-believe ... who wandered at last into a still

more shadowy realm, became a picture player ... by and by a _grande

artiste_, with the world at her feet ... who one day, in the fabric of

her life, found me waiting to tell about it, and said:

“Oh, very well, if you think it worth while”; and I did, and do, think

it worth while, and will let it go at that.

* * * * *

Sometimes Griffith took them out “on location,” and those were joyous

days, for it meant green fields and running brooks, and wooded

hillsides, though sometimes the work was strenuous, even wet, when one

had to fall into the cold water and be rescued, especially when it had

to be repeated a dozen times or so, to get it just right. On the whole,

those were good days—picnic days.

Griffith’s group of players was a notable one. Besides Mary, Lillian and

Dorothy, he had Blanche Sweet, “the Biograph blonde,” a real star,

melting, luscious; Miriam Cooper, Mary Alden, Robert Harron, Henry

Walthall, Lionel Barrymore—most of them young twenty years ago—_had_ to

be, to play anything like youthful parts, for all the indoor lightings

were from overhead, the shadows were harsh and black—every line and

wrinkle showed. There could be no retouching of the tiny film faces—the

screen presented them not only as they were, but worse than they were,

their defects magnified. Young girls like Mary and Lillian, even

Dorothy, took grown-up parts:—the fairer and smoother their skin, the

better the general result.

Slender youth had its disadvantages. Lillian was one day cast for the

part of a vigorous young woman. The later, popular “boy form” was not

yet appreciated. The public demanded a certain opulence in its heroines,

especially in what was irreverently known as their “upper works.”

Griffith regarded Lillian thoughtfully.

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

enough.”

It was just luncheon time. The girls said nothing, but presently dashed

out, and down Fourteenth Street, to a place where, in a show-window,

they had noticed the desired contours for sale, substantial ones, firm

and ample, of buckram.

A bite to eat, a trip to the dressing-room, and they were ready.

Griffith, considering his cast, took another look at Lillian, rubbed his

eyes, decided that after all she would do.

Thus was wrought the miracle of Fourteenth Street.

III

BELASCO DELIVERS A VERDICT

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

replied:

I can’t talk to anyone about it, not now. I want it all to myself

for just a little while....

I am with the Biograph, but none of my pictures have been released

as yet; will let you know the names of them. I have signed with

David Belasco for next season, and we open here in New York on

Christmas Eve at Belasco Theatre. Although it is a good company, I

have a very small part. I am going to do pictures on the side, so

that is some help.... Well, I must get supper.

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

November she wrote:

I was worked to death my last days at the Biograph, and then I was

so excited when I started to rehearse in this new play that I

couldn’t even eat. The name of the play is “The Good Little

Devil.” It is a fairy play, and we open December 10, in Phila. and

Xmas night in N. Y. I play Morgane, a fairy....

Lillian enjoyed rehearsing when it did not last too long. There were

some half-a-dozen of the fairies, and they flew—flew wonderfully,

suspended on wires, pulled from somewhere below by eighteen strong

Germans. She loved the flying sensation—so much that she would go before

rehearsal-time and rehearse a little on her own account. She tried all

the wires, and the big Germans delighted in sending her soaring into the

air. In the play, she was the “Gold Fairy,” that flew highest. And there

was one scene where she rested on a wall. Belasco, watching the

rehearsals one day, was asked by a reporter what he thought of her

looks. Belasco sent a glance at the slender figure on the wall, at the

unearthly face surrounded by a tumbling mass of gold.

“Most beautiful blonde in the world,” he said, and next day that label

found its way into print and general circulation.

Not long ago—a month or two before he died—Belasco qualified—a little:

He had not then, he said, seen _all_ the beautiful blondes in the world.

Perhaps he should have said: “_One_ of the most beautiful.” But as

Belasco had seen a very great number of beautiful blondes—probably the

pick of them—the verdict will be allowed to stand as reported,

especially as it was never questioned. Lillian’s beauty was not then

what it became later:—as revealed in “The White Sister,” for instance,

in “Romola,” in “La Bohême,” and more recently in “Uncle Vanya.”

* * * * *

“The Good Little Devil” did not follow any of the announced dates. It

opened successfully in Washington, or Philadelphia, and was in Baltimore

for Christmas. They gave two performances that day, during the second of

which there was an accident—serious enough, though it might have been

worse.

In the act where she landed on the wall, she left it with a step-down of

six feet. The wire, of course, lifted her down, but in this performance

something was wrong, and she literally stepped into space. The

sickening, helpless feeling of expecting support and finding none! The

fall made her quite ill; her understudy had to finish the play.

“I cried all night,” she wrote Nell, “I was so lonely and

broken-hearted.”

She was apparently not injured, but terribly shaken; and then, the

audience had laughed. Mr. Belasco hurried to her dressing-room to

comfort her. The audience was not laughing at her, he said, but at the

incident. She must not mind that; everything was going to be all right.

It was, but the shock had weakened her.

Back in New York, with another hard siege of rehearsing, before the

opening there. Griffith, as was his custom each winter, had taken his

company to Los Angeles, Dorothy with them. Lillian, to save money, lived

in a tiny room at the Marlton Hotel, in 8th Street, and with a Sterno

lamp, cooked her food, which consisted of tinned things and tea.

Weakened as she undoubtedly was by her fall, this was but poor

nourishment on which to meet Belasco’s strenuous rehearsals. January 8

(1913), she wrote:

It is now 3:30 in the morning of Wednesday, and I have just

returned from a dress rehearsal. We open tonight, and everything

has to be just so; we rehearsed until 4:30 yesterday morning.

Nell, I don’t know how to thank you for what you have offered me.

You both can’t know how wonderful it is to have someone offer me a

home, and how I would love to follow the desire of my heart and

come to you. But I can’t. I can’t, because I have to make my way

in this world from now on. Mother has worked all her life; surely,

it’s my turn, now....

The picture you painted for me in your letter made me cry, because

I was reading it in my dressing-room, and I happened to glance up

at a mirror, and there I sat, all false, with paint and cosmetics

covering my face, and it came to me what a distance it was from my

life to yours.

Mary was getting a good salary, and had bought her mother a car. Lillian

said to her, one day: “How happy you must be, Mary, to be able to give

your mother so much.” Her own weekly twenty-five dollars went such a

little way. The room—one had to have a decent address—took so much of it

... and clothes—one must make a decent appearance—and the extras! A new

coat ... a mistake ... it looked well, but was not warm enough.

She was far from well, and knew it. Mrs. Pickford and Mary insisted on

her seeing a doctor, who told them that she was threatened with

pernicious anemia, and would die if she did not change her mode of

living. They spoke about it to Belasco, who offered to send her to

Florida at his own expense. When he learned that Griffith had offered

her work on the coast, at double her present salary, he at once agreed

to pay her fare to Los Angeles.

She hung on until the end of January—postponed until she was warned that

unless she went at once, it would be too late. They did not tell her,

but they were by no means certain that it was not too late already. So

she surrendered. Belasco bought her ticket to Los Angeles; her mother

was already on the way out there. Dorothy wrote of glorious California

sunshine. It made her better to think of it.

And then, at the end, a tragedy: The eighteen strong Germans who pulled

the wires, and adored her, went to the train with their own little brass

band, to say good-bye. Ah, me, she had somehow told them the wrong

station ... a heartbreak ... one that could not be mended.

She traveled by the Los Angeles Limited, and for the first time in her

life, knew the full luxury of a Pullman. On the way, she wrote:

I am going on and on, with miles upon miles separating us, it

seems, but it is not so, dear, as we are just as near to one

another now as we were in the old days, when we used to take “John

Halifax” and go to your room, and read. Can you ever forget those

days, and will they ever come back again?

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

am going back to Mr. Belasco.

But she would never go back—either to Nell, or Belasco. Four days later,

she was in Los Angeles, earning a salary of fifty dollars weekly. The

hard days were over.

IV

A STUDIO ON PICO STREET

California sunshine, California Zinfandel—doctor’s orders, fifty cents a

gallon—open air and exercise—worked their miracle. The pictures were

made out-of-doors—even the interior sets were on an outside stage, with

daylight illumination—and there were many “Westerns,” with riding.

In no time, Lillian, like Dorothy and the others, went racing over the

hills behind Los Angeles—an Indian, a cowboy, a settler, a pursued

heroine—sometimes all of those things in one day; for there was no star

aristocracy in Griffith’s troupe. One might be a star one hour, and an

extra the next, and nobody cared, and everybody was happy, and Lillian

grew well, and physically hardened to the demands of picture making—by

no means light.

Her riding practice with the Indian girl at Shawnee came in handy now. A

horse, even a wild one, had no terrors for her. In one of the early

pictures, Lillian, with two men, Raoul Walsh and George Siegman, were

chosen for some special riding. The horses were range ponies—one of them

looked dangerous. The men regarded him doubtfully. Lillian said, “I’ll

take him.” He seemed to her no worse than those she had ridden in

Oklahoma.

They swept by the camera beautifully, but they were supposed to turn and

do it again. The others turned, but Lillian’s horse went on. His nose

was toward the ranch. There were some trees and bushes, and he tore

through them, to get her off his back.

Now, it happened that an Indian, a real Indian, named “Eagle Eye” lay

asleep among the bushes, and the pounding hoofs awakened him. A real

Indian knows what to do under such circumstances. He leaped straight

from his nap, caught the mad pony’s bridle, and the heroine was saved.

In another picture, she had to jump from a buckboard, behind a runaway

team, to a cowboy’s arms. Christy Cabanné was the director, and Bobby

Burns, of the Burns Brothers who did most of the dangerous riding, was

the cowboy rescuer. Lillian had no fear of the jump—her faith in Bobby

was perfect—but the pony he was riding sank beneath the suddenly added

weight, and nearly went down. “Closest and most dangerous thing I ever

did,” Bobby said when it was over.

Lillian loved California, and why not? It had given her a new freedom,

and with it, her health. News came of the arrival of Nell’s baby.

Incredible to think of Nell with a baby! “Oh, Nell, does it really

belong to you?” And a few lines further along, “This is a wonderful

country! How I wish you could be here; it would do you so much good. It

is just like summer, and they have wonderful mocking-birds and beautiful

nights.”

* * * * *

I do not know the name of Lillian’s first California picture, nor the

sequence of those that followed. Nobody today seems to remember these

things, and they are not very important. There was a good deal of

sameness about the Westerns, and most of them were that. “A

Misunderstood Boy” was among the titles, “Just Gold,” and “The Lady and

the Mouse”; but as Griffith was turning out pictures at the rate of one,

or two and even three, a week—short films, in those days—these titles

suggest no more than brief stages of preparation for the day a year or

two later when he would begin to write the Greater Picture story across

the screens of the world.

But they did something for Lillian and Dorothy: They taught them the

technique and mechanics of film photography, in and out of doors, and

their alert minds absorbed it as by instinct. It was only a little while

until Griffith discussed his pictures with them, asked their

suggestions. And something more: The public recognized their faces from

the pictures of the previous summer, and began to inquire who they were.

One day Lillian was interviewed. Surely this was “coming on.” The

reporter had heard of Belasco’s verdict; it had run ahead of her, and

was known and repeated in California almost as soon as she arrived. The

reporter wrote about Belasco, and then on his own account called her

“Lillian, the adorable.”

It was pleasant, of course, to be written of like that, but she wished

he had said more about her pictures. She led the next reporter around to

them, explaining that her work was the important thing. He asked her

what one must do to be a screen actress, and quoted her as saying:

“To play for the pictures is mostly a matter of the face, and the

inside. You have to learn to think, inside.”

Being a young reporter, he was willing to believe that it was a matter

of the face—_her_ face: “A tea rose” he called it, “reflected in a

moonlit mirror.” Also he spoke of ivory, and pale jade, and of other

things not closely related to acting.

There was no Hollywood in that halcyon day, no picture Hollywood. That

“particularly irrational” corner of the universe had as yet neither name

nor fame. The Biograph studio was in Los Angeles, on Pico Street, a

building thought to be rather large, being one hundred or

one-hundred-and-fifty feet long—a narrow shack, used chiefly as a

carpentry shop, and for dressing-rooms—one each, for men and women.

As before mentioned, the photography was done on a stage set up outside,

by daylight. There were sliding curtains above, like those in a

photograph gallery, which is about all it was. The curtains controlled

the sun, but the wind blew in and candles flickered, tablecloths waved

ghostily, and occasionally something blew off the shelf, even in a

“perfectly still” room. When it rained, they went into the carpentry

shop and rehearsed. Often, the younger ones rehearsed while the older

ones watched them. Always they rehearsed on rainy days. They spoke

whatever words came into their heads, except during “silent rehearsals,”

when they were supposed to convey the meaning in pantomime.

Griffith wrote most of his own plays—scenarios—a good many more than he

needed. He could not afford to have them tried out by expensive people,

so he used helpers—extras, stage-hands, anybody—for preliminary

rehearsals. Sometimes it happened that a very humble servitor put

astonishing life and conviction into what he, or she, was doing, and

Griffith was just the person to recognize it. Bobby Harron, a property

boy, had been like that. And there would be many others, including

Constance Talmadge, Wallace Reid, and Valentino. It was Dorothy who

suggested giving a part to Valentino. Griffith demurred, on the ground

that he didn’t believe he would be popular with women—too

“foreign-looking.” Amazing conclusion! But “Rudy” was cruder, then.

Perhaps Mencken’s “catnip to women” would not have been so neat a turn.

They were a busy crowd in the Pico Street studio. Griffith had a vacant

lot out back, and those not in the scenes were sent there to limber

up—to practice running and walking, arm movements, a variety of

gymnastic work, all in the direction of a better expression of emotions.

Long hours. For many of the pictures, they had to get up in the dark, to

be “on location” by sunrise. Hard days in the field, home late, hot,

hungry and ready for bed. And always, those not in action were

rehearsing, rehearsing, rehearsing, or prancing up and down that deadly

lot, making muscle for the next job.

They ate how and when they could. Something was taken along by those who

went to the field. The others grabbed a sandwich or a plate of soup, or

pie and milk, from the White Kitchen, a tiny nearby shack. Abbreviated

luncheons were sometimes brought to the set—“studio food”—that is,

something not messy, nor especially appetizing. Experimental

luncheon-places were tried in the studio, but not very successfully.

There was nothing resembling dissipation among the Biograph group. On

the contrary, there was an atmosphere of earnest study and thought.

Stimulated by Griffith, himself a voluminous and inclusive reader, the

young women, especially, rather put on airs in their devotion to

research and philosophy: Nietzsche, Strindberg, Schopenhauer,

Spinoza—these were their favorites. What time they found to read them,

it is difficult to see, now—nights and Sundays, perhaps. At all events,

they did read them, or read at them, and discussed them feverishly

during any spare moments. Blanche Sweet, Mae Marsh, Lillian and Dorothy,

Miriam Cooper, Anita Loos—these chiefly were the students. Anita Loos

was in the scenario department, and very keen, one of the best-posted.

Anita discussed so much, and so capably, that Griffith called her

“Madame Spinoza.”

When it happened that they made a picture that touched upon anything

historic or geographic, they tried to “read up” for color, costume,

background. Lillian reveled in such research; swiftly, eagerly, she

added to her knowledge of the past, of life in general. The others were

like that, too, more or less.

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

ago.

“I don’t know; I don’t remember any. I don’t see where they would have

found time for them. Today, stars and others make one big production,

and have long waits between. We had nothing like that. We were producing

every day. The demand was good, and not many companies. It was a

different world.”

Such a little while ago ... less than twenty years ... just yesterday!

But thinking of it now, and of all that has come, and gone, since then,

it seems, somehow, a Golden Age.

* * * * *

I like to think of Lillian in that truly lovely environment, that

“garden between dawn and sunrise,” among those wholesome, beautiful

girls and those strong, handsome young men, all busy at a work which,

however crude and inconsequential it may seem today, brought cheer and

comfort to the millions, then. I like to think of her and Dorothy

dashing along the hillsides, on range ponies, as painted Indians, or

whooping cowboys; I like to think of them with their mother, in their

apartment at the Brentwood, digging into the books which now for the

first time they could afford to buy—making up, as far as might be, for

the insufficient years.

How starved they were for books! They would drop into a book shop for

one, and come out with an armful. Before they knew it, they were

acquiring a library. Life was becoming worth while. Lillian to Nell:

“The world unfolds itself to me more and more every day, and sometimes

it seems so bright; then it changes ...”

For the most part she thought herself very well off—in a world where no

one is more than passably happy—and increasingly devoted herself to her

work.

She began to train her facial muscles to obey her, to reflect her

thoughts. “You must think inside,” she had told the reporter, by which

she meant, I suppose, that one must do one’s own thinking, rather than

merely reflect the thought of the director, must persuade one’s

muscles—all of one’s muscles and members—unconsciously to obey the

inward thought. “Think inside and your trained body will take care of

itself,” might have been her creed. Not all players could adopt it. Some

could hardly be said to think at all. Thought, the director’s thought,

filtered through them. Griffith found her always willing—eager—to

listen—but not pliable.... More and more he left her alone. Lately he

said—to the writer:

“Dorothy was more apt at getting the director’s idea than Lillian,

quicker to follow it, more easily satisfied with the result. Lillian

conceived an ideal, and patiently sought to realize it. Genius is like

that: the ideal becomes real to it.”

From his lofty hotel window, David Wark Griffith looked out across the

tops of Babylon. Reflectively, he added:

“She is the best actress in New York—the best I know. She has the most

brains. Joseph Medill Patterson once said to me: ‘Lillian Gish has the

best mind of any woman I ever met.’ But I knew that, already.”

V

THE PATH TO STARDOM

Lillian to Nell:

I want you to see “A Mothering Heart” ... I cried and lost so much

sleep over that picture, that I am sure you would like it.

When the picture was an important one, she rehearsed the whole night,

sometimes, alone in her room, going over the scenes again and again. She

never required “glycerine tears”—she lived the part too vividly. A good

many years later, she wrote:

“The first important picture in which I appeared was ‘The Mothering

Heart.’ This was noteworthy, not only because it was in two reels, but

because the vast sum of eighteen hundred dollars had been spent in the

making.”

“A Mothering Heart” received gratifying notices: “Her best picture, thus

far”; “Her lack of so-called acting is the secret of her success”; “Mr.

Belasco said very little when he called her ‘the most beautiful blonde

in the world’”; “The hit of her career.” All of which would indicate

that those nights and days of rehearsal had not been wasted; also, that

a picture “career” bore no very close relation to elapsed time.

There was some reason in this: fame of a sort had come to her with

astonishing suddenness—the fame that comes to a striking face and

personality, interestingly presented in a thousand towns and cities. It

was like magic. She had really done nothing of importance, yet she had a

“career”—her name and face were widely familiar.

There began to be a sifting-in of “fan” letters—rather a new thing in

the picture world. Admirers did not always know where to write. And

there was something remote, something baffling, in the idea of writing

to a picture; something suggestive of the bibulous young man, waiting at

the back door of a movie-house “to take Mary Pickford home.”

Then, more and more, the notices and the magazines gave addresses; the

name of the producing company appeared on the title flash of the film

itself, though it generally vanished and was forgotten before one had a

chance to fall in love with the star. Still, the letters came, and the

sift became a drift that in time would become an avalanche. Some were

from children.

* * * * *

Lillian to Nell:

Tomorrow we start on our last picture out here, “Judith and

Holofernes,” from the Bible story, a wonderful theme.

“Judith of Bethulia,” as they finally called it, was Griffith’s most

pretentious undertaking up to “The Birth of a Nation,” of which it was

the forerunner. He took his players up to Chatsworth Park, a desert

place in the hills, and set up an ancient walled city, engaged an army

of extras, men, women, children, even babies. Also, expert riders and

trained horses, and went into strenuous daily rehearsal. The “Park” was

a place of sand and rock and cactus, a good way from Los Angeles. They

went by street car, then train, finishing the trip by hay-wagon. They

got up at four or five o’clock, in order to be on the ground, dressed

and made-up when the sun rose. Bottles of snake-bite antidote were

issued to the players, for rattlers were very common there. An actress

saw a coil of rubber tubing on a stump, and started to get it. It

behaved curiously, and she lost interest—lost it at the rate of several

miles an hour, until she was safely with the others.

It was June—the weather was blazing hot. They worked all day in the sun

and dust, sweltering in Oriental garments, through the longest days of

the year. When they got back to Los Angeles, it was dark, and they were

hardly in bed before they had to get up again. As soon as the desert

scenes were finished, Griffith packed up his players and set out for New

York to finish the studio scenes there. In this picture, Blanche Sweet

had the part of Judith, Henry Walthall was Holofernes. Lillian had a

small part, a little Mother in Israel.

Only a little while ago, with Lillian, in a small New York

projection-room, I saw “Judith and Holofernes” on the screen. I was

amazed, and I think she was, at how good it was. The photography was

excellent, would pass as such today: soft, brown in tone, with little of

the jerkiness that came of the slow camera. Furthermore, the story was

beautifully conveyed.

It was terribly dry, hot and dusty there, which took nothing away from

the realism. The clouds of dust that rose from a battle scene gave a

magnificence and mystery to the effect—a reality that was stirring, even

today. It is easy to believe that an audience which had not yet seen

“The Birth of a Nation,” was awed by the spectacle.

There was a great deal of fine horsemanship. Horses trained to fall,

their riders flung far and wide, were not then so common. Blanche Sweet

made a perfect Judith. Lillian’s part, though small, was quite lovely.

She was a little mother, running about, seeking water for the baby held

always close to her breast. There were other babies in the picture.

Babies were easy to get, then. There was no enforced law about it, and

one could pick them up by the dozen, in Los Angeles, or anywhere—Mexican

babies—with a little girl to look after them when not in use.

* * * * *

The studio scenes of “Judith” were not made in the old Fourteenth Street

place. During the winter, the Biograph Company had built a vast, new

studio uptown, at 175th Street, great floor space, and dressing-rooms

for all. They had thought their crowded dressing-rooms in California

inconvenient—just one for women and another for men, rather scrambly and

messy ... long tables, with mirrors back to back, in the center ... one

side for the regulars, the other for the extras. Everybody thought the

new place was going to be fine, but it wasn’t. All the fun, the cozy,

intimate comradeship, was gone.

* * * * *

Griffith was restless. Primarily, he wanted to get out of picture

making, and write. He had written his way into pictures, now he dreamed

of writing his way out of them. He was a poet at heart. He had a poem

and a play to his credit, besides dozens of scenarios. All the time he

wanted to settle down to writing.

It was no use. He couldn’t settle down, even if they would let him, and

they wouldn’t let him. He was too good a director for that—the best—much

the best in the field. Settle down! Preposterous! But he quit the

Biograph Company. They were niggardly about expenses; sometimes (often,

in fact), he used his own money—and they had an economy complex in the

matter of salaries. The Reliance-Majestic, a more recent organization,

offered him a free hand. He went to them in October. With him went the

Biograph players, almost in a body. A few were tied by contract, but the

others went, Lillian and Dorothy among them.

Those young people had faith in Griffith, and loved him. Loved him when

he raised their wages, loved him and were still faithful even when the

day came, as presently it did come, when he was wading so deeply in the

tide of battle and Reconstruction that attended “The Birth of a Nation,”

that he could not find enough to go around. They knew he would pay to

the last penny when it was possible, and he always did. With or without

wages, they would stand by.

The Reliance-Majestic Company had a studio on the Clara Morris estate,

Yonkers; another at Sixteenth Street and Union Square, West. It is said

that in less than an hour after Griffith had closed the Biograph door

behind him, he was directing on Union Square a scene for a new five-reel

picture, which he made in six days and nights, working constantly—all

day and night. Perhaps he wanted to make a showing to the new company.

Perhaps there was a need of quick money—usually there was.

In this new picture, “The Battle of the Sexes,” Lillian was cast for the

leading part: a daughter who suffers, and brings an erring father to

repentance. In the beginning, it was called “The Single Standard,” and

in that pre-war moment, was thought to be rather risqué. Today, it would

be a Sunday-school picture, dramatically and morally suited to Third

Avenue, New York’s remaining stronghold of respectability.

The cast included, besides Lillian, Mary Alden, Donald Crisp, Bobby

Harron, Fay Tincher, and Owen Moore. In one scene, the climax, Lillian

has a sixshooter ready for Fay Tincher, the vamp who has broken up the

family. Her finger, however, refuses to pull the trigger. Her father,

entering, finding her in this dubious association, asks: “You, my

daughter, what are you doing here?” And the devastating reply: “You, my

father, what are _you_ doing here?” gives him something to think about.

A notice says: “The sets were lavish, but above all, they were true to

the higher social sphere.” Third Avenue would adore it. “The Battle of

the Sexes” was Griffith’s first release for the Reliance-Majestic. There

was a prologue and four reels; longer than “Judith of Bethulia.”

VI

“HOME, SWEET HOME”

Griffith had far greater battles in his mind. In January he severed

regular connection with the Reliance-Majestic, but arranged, under their

auspices, to produce a Civil War picture, based on Thomas Dixon’s book,

“The Clansman.” Then, early in February, he took his entire group of

players to the Coast, and began, not that picture, but pictures that

would earn money for the undertaking. No one, not even Griffith himself,

guessed the size of that undertaking, but better than the others,

Griffith knew that it would require an overhead which would cause, among

his backers, an outbreak of apoplexy, if they got even a hint of it.

* * * * *

Griffith had a bent for melodrama. Also, he knew there was money in it,

and money was very necessary just now, in view of the big project ahead.

It occurred to him that John Howard Payne’s “Home, Sweet Home” had a

more universal appeal than any similar composition in the nation’s

history. A story of the author’s life, followed by a set of scenes using

that old heart-throb as a call to the erring wanderer or comfort to the

heavy-laden, would be irresistible. Walthall would be cast as Payne,

Lillian as his sweetheart; at the end, a spiritual transition, as in

“Uncle Tom.”

At the Reliance-Majestic, or Fine Arts studio, on Sunset and Hollywood

Boulevards, the work was pushed forward rapidly, to have the picture

ready for Spring release. In a full-page announcement of the big, new

feature, we read:

“Twenty-five famous screen stars will participate in the play, which

will be a very ‘portentous’ one.”

Whether the printer meant to set “pretentious” or “portentous,” is of

small consequence. It was both. Griffith meant to make it the former.

Payne, had he been consulted, would have voted for the latter, for in

the picture, he dies and goes to Hell. That a poet, author of an

immortal song, could have been sent to Hell, even temporarily, as late

as the Spring of 1914, shows how far we have traveled since then. A

newspaper symposium had abolished Hell a good while before that time,

but perhaps Griffith hadn’t heard of it yet. Griffith made Payne abandon

his sweetheart, so doubtless it was proper that he should have a taste

of Hell, even in 1914.

Then follow the “episodes”: A young Easterner is about to forsake Mae

Marsh (“Apple-pie Mary”), when the strains of “Home, Sweet Home” on an

accordion, win him back to her “calico-covered arms.” A business man’s

wife is about to “step out,” when a “great musician” in the flat below

strikes up “Home, Sweet Home,” and a wife’s honor is safe. The fact that

great musicians so seldom play “Home, Sweet Home” as a pastime, did not

trouble Griffith. His did.

The picture ended in a manner no longer to be taken seriously. Payne

(Walthall), dying in sin, goes promptly to an impressive Hell, a chasm

in the mountains, where, arrayed in an astonishing costume, considering

the climate, he is given a disagreeable time by certain devils wearing

the falsest of false faces. His sweetheart (Lillian), dying a saint, had

gone straight to Heaven—a sort of grown-up Little Eva. Must Payne remain

in Hell? Not above a week, at the longest. “Little Eva,” suspended on

wires, as when she had been the Gold Fairy of Belasco, descends in a

white robe, and her poor renegade lover, seizing the folds of that

immaculate garment, is borne upward and outward to Paradise, backing

away from the audience, so that their faces may never be lost. Probably

only the beauty of Walthall and Lillian saved such a scene, even in that

remote time, from the shouts of joy which would surely greet it today.

Seventeen years later, in the little projection room on Seventh Avenue,

I watched, with Lillian, an unreeling of this ancient film. It seemed to

me, as, I think, to her, pretty crude:—in places, childish. The costumes

had been selected from an assortment something more limited than the old

Biograph wardrobe, and were either amusing or pathetic, as you happened

to think. The acting was not much better. I don’t quite know what was

the matter with it, but it conveyed the impression of being amateurish,

though all the actors were, in effect, stars. Lillian’s half-hysterical

“Wasn’t I terrible?” expressed one’s general feeling as to all of them.

Mae Marsh in a comedy part, was the best of the lot. The photography was

on a par with the rest of it. Yet it followed “Judith of Bethulia” by

several months. What _was_ the matter?

And since we have been speaking of “Little Eva,” perhaps this is as good

a place as any to state that Lillian had never, at any time, played that

part. She might have done so, had there been any “Uncle Tom”

combinations when she was a child trouper. “Uncle Tom” had died

permanently, by that time. Interviewers, however, when they looked at

her, could not believe, when she told them that she had played “Little

Willie” in “East Lynne,” that she was not saying “Little Eva in ‘Uncle

Tom,’” and they so often printed this statement that in time she almost

believed it herself. I am making a special paragraph of this denial to

set the matter straight—for all of us.

* * * * *

Busy days, these. Under one director and another, Griffith kept Lillian

and Dorothy going, usually in different pictures, though sometimes, as

in “The Sisters,” together. They made an attractive pair, but Griffith

could not afford to waste them on small pictures—“program”

pictures—besides, it was not easy to get stories—picture stories—to fit.

Dorothy became a star on her own account, with Walthall in “The Mountain

Rat,” a Western; and in “The Mysterious Shot,” with Jack Pickford, who

had joined the movie forces. Jack, apparently, had conquered his old

infatuation, for we hear nothing further of it. “The Rat” was Dorothy’s

first star part, and a very good one of its kind, being that of a

red-light girl, considered then rather a daring portrayal for a girl of

sixteen. All these were pot-boilers, while preparations for the great

Civil War spectacle went forward.

They also kept the names and faces of Griffith’s stars before the

public—an important matter, for the field was getting full of

producers—stars were being created almost overnight. Nor did Griffith

let them get into a rut by working always under one director. Lillian,

alternately under Christy Cabanné and Jack O’Brien, was receiving

liberal training.

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

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

each.”

Interviews were very frequent, now, the reporters kind. They referred to

Lillian and Dorothy as the “darlings of the screen,” and they rarely

failed to remember Belasco’s verdict, which found its way even to

Massillon. “MASSILLON GIRL CALLED THE MOST BEAUTIFUL BLONDE IN THE

WORLD” made a three-column headline, with a picture of Lillian to prove

it; as if everybody in Massillon hadn’t known that, long ago.

VII

“THE BIRTH OF A NATION”

David Wark Griffith was the son of a soldier, and had been brought up on

war tales. He believed the time had come when the talk that had been so

vivid to his childhood, should be given form and motion—that the bitter

struggle of four years, with its rankling sequences, should be presented

on the screen.

From Thomas Dixon’s “The Leopard’s Spots” and “The Clansman,” he

outlined his scenario, and began work. The latter title was to be the

name of the picture. The new, and far greater, title, “The Birth of a

Nation,” was not used until the film had been actually finished and

shown. The story of this achievement—the first, and still, in many

respects, the greatest, of war pictures—has many times been told. One or

two paragraphs, however, from Robert Edgar Long’s biography of Griffith,

may not be out of place:

Six weeks of constant rehearsals preceded the taking of the first

scene, and throughout the next six months required to complete the

spectacle, so many things happened it would require an entire

volume to enumerate them.

Among the most notable scenes in the finished production were the

battle of Petersburg, fought by eighteen thousand men on a field

five miles across; the march of Sherman to the sea, culminating in

the burning of Atlanta; the assassination of President Lincoln in

the crowded Ford’s Theatre in Washington; the wild rides of the Ku

Klux Klan, and the session of the South Carolina Legislature under

the negro carpet-bagger régime.

Had Griffith guessed that the World War was coming, he would hardly have

had the courage to begin. He had to assemble a vast horde of extras,

horses, thousands of uniforms and Ku Klux gowns; arms; he had to

construct breastworks, trenches—all the front of war; he had to do all

this when a real war was sweeping Europe, and all prices, especially of

the things he needed, soaring to the sky. Horses were the hardest. I do

not yet see where he got them, when European agents were everywhere in

search of just the horses he wanted.

And then the money: The treasurer of the Reliance-Majestic company must

have believed that Griffith thought him the treasurer of the United

States, the way he drew on him. Of course, there was an end to that:

Griffith had to go outside for money and credit. One may imagine him

buying all the white cotton in Los Angeles to make those Ku Klux gowns,

most of it on credit. Long says:

It became a battle for dollars, and it is told that the determined

Griffith himself actually went begging among the merchants of Los

Angeles to get the final one thousand dollars with which to

complete his work.

Most of Griffith’s players went into the cast, as the rôles seemed to

fit them. Of the female parts, Mae Marsh was supposed to have the best.

Blanche Sweet was still held to be Griffith’s chief star and as the part

of Elsie Stoneman, the Northern girl who becomes the sweetheart of the

Southern Colonel (Walthall), did not seem quite big enough for her,

Griffith gave it to Lillian. At least, that is the way it is remembered,

now. I think there were other reasons: In the first place, Walthall was

of small stature, which accounts for his being dubbed the “little

Colonel” in the play. Blanche was of ample proportions; the two were not

a good match. For another thing, Griffith knew that Lillian’s frail

loveliness set against the big mulatto features of the villain of the

piece, the man bound to possess her, would move the audience as would

the face of no other member of his company. It is also just possible

that Griffith, in the beginning, did not realize how big the part of

Elsie Stoneman was to be. He had a fashion of making his play as he went

along. Fifteen years later, he only said:

“When I gave Lillian a part in ‘The Birth of a Nation,’ I merely thought

she could play it, without considering how well, or at least without

thinking she would make anything special out of it, though of course, by

that time, I knew she would do it in her own way.”

[Illustration: LILLIAN AND DOROTHY, DURING THE GRIFFITH PERIOD]

The field work of the “Birth” was done at the Universal Ranch, a place

of diversified scenery outside Los Angeles. The play itself was made at

the Fine Arts studio, which consisted of an exterior stage like that on

Pico Street—only, instead of a large building, a lot of little shacks

served as temporary, very temporary, dressing-rooms. Any player so

inclined could build one for his or her own use, and trim it and

decorate it according to fancy. The roof was merely a piece of canvas,

held in place—also according to fancy. It rarely rained.

At one side of the lot, was constructed the “street” on which fronted

the Cameron Southern home, about which most of the play centered. There

was not much in the way of scenic designing. A stage carpenter, Huck

Wortman, one of the old-fashioned kind who chewed tobacco and cocked up

his eye, was equal to most things. If Griffith wanted a village street,

with a vine-covered cottage; or a Southern mansion; or a hospital; Huck

cocked an eye, shifted his quid, and said, “Aw right,” and it was so.

* * * * *

As a Civil War spectacle, “The Birth of a Nation” will probably never be

outdone. The battle-field, with its miles of hand-to-hand fighting; the

assembling of the Klan—hundreds of them in white robes,

mounted;—Lincoln’s assassination—these things were more impressive than

even the reality could have been, for no one of them was ever viewed in

its entirety, or with deliberation, and it seems impossible that they

should ever have been more real. Stirring, appropriate music, fitted by

Griffith to the scenes, added a final thrill.

The negro aspects of the picture were not entirely fortunate ... within

the facts, but hardly within the proprieties. It attached no blame to

the negro for the abuses of Reconstruction, but presented him in an

unfavorable light. Negro political domination in the South was an evil

growing out of the war—a war and an evil for which the negro was the

last person to be held responsible, the last person to be reminded of

them.

“The Clansman,” as if was first called, was shown publicly at Clune’s

Auditorium, Los Angeles, on the evening of February 8, 1915, all the

film colony of Los Angeles being present. Reports had been spread that

there would be negro rioting, and the police were out in force. There

was no trouble. The theatre was jammed. Here and there in the audience

were negroes.

Following this presentation, a print of the picture was hurried to

Washington, and shown to President Wilson, members of the Cabinet, and

their families. A few days later, February 20, this print was run in New

York, for the censors, and others concerned. Thomas Dixon, author of the

story, was present, and declared excitedly, to Griffith: “‘The Clansman’

is too tame a title for what you have done. Let’s call it ‘The Birth of

a Nation,’” which became its title, then and there.

On March 3, the picture was shown at the Liberty Theatre, New York City,

at two dollars a seat, the first time a motion picture ever became a

full-sized theatre attraction. Even so, it was in for a record run.

* * * * *

Lillian’s success as Elsie Stoneman was a complete surprise to her, for

she had not liked the part, and then it had dragged on so long. But when

the notices poured in, she must have begun to wonder if anybody but

herself and Walthall were in the picture. Their faces together, or hers

alone, looked out from every page. From New York, Thomas Dixon wrote:

_My dear Miss Gish_:

I don’t care to tell you all the beautiful things I’d like to say

about you and your exquisite work in our picture....

Between the acts, last week, a distinguished young man of

letters—editor of a great magazine—found me in the lobby, dragged

me one side and whispered “For God’s sake, tell me quick, who is

the glorious little girl playing Elsie?” I answered, “Miss Lillian

Gish.” “I want to meet her right away! Where is she?” he gasped.

He’s only one of many hundreds. How can I ever thank you for such

work? Believe me it belongs to the big things in life for which

money never pays. I am your debtor for services, for which I not

only could never pay but don’t know how to thank you....

Sincerely,

THOMAS DIXON.

Dorothy fortunately had no part in “The Birth of a Nation”—fortunately,

because she was overtaken by an accident when the picture was well under

way. Of course, it was just a coincidence that a fortune-teller, only a

little while before, had warned her against an automobile accident.

Anybody could do that. Nevertheless, he _had_ warned her—and she _would_

walk across the street where automobiles were passing. On that

particular day—it was Thanksgiving—she had been lunching with Griffith

and Mae Marsh and Miriam Cooper, and coming out of the restaurant, held

to Griffith’s coat, demanding that he buy her something.

“Oh, Mr. Griffith, please buy me some candy, Mr. Griffith. Please buy me

some chewing gum. Oh, Mr. Griffith—please——”

They were crossing a street just then, the Boulevard, crowded with

cars—the others a little way in advance of Dorothy. She never knew quite

what happened, but in the wink of an eye, she was down on the ground on

her face; a car that had struck her in a variety of places—was standing

with its front wheel between her feet, one of which it had crushed.

Dorothy’s disaster was not all sorrow. Lillian was with her most of the

time. Friends were willing to entertain her steadily. Griffith had a

miniature screen installed, with a projection machine, and gave her a

private view of so much of “The Birth of a Nation” as was then complete.

No damaged young queen had ever been so royally entertained. In a

reasonably brief space, she was on her feet—limping for a time, but

otherwise as well as ever.

VIII

“INTOLERANCE”

The Griffith lot was at 4500 Sunset Boulevard, on the edge of Hollywood,

then a residential suburb, named for one of the earliest homes there.

Hollywood residents observed with curiosity, but with no special alarm,

the interesting picture-making plants that were appearing here and there

in their neighborhood. California has a taste for publicity:

“Ladies and gentlemen, since there seems to be nothing further to be

said for the Dear Departed, I should be glad to make a few remarks about

California.”

That Griffith, on the very edge of Hollywood, had made the great picture

then sweeping the country, was something on which to “make a few

remarks,” though it is unlikely that even the most sanguine residents

guessed that within a comparatively brief time, their little suburb

would become the center of one of the world’s richest industries; a

collection of amazing architectural construction; a strange, irrational

region, in and about whose environs frail cities and quaint villages,

fair palaces and weird ships and oceans, would appear and vanish, beyond

the dreams of all the fairylands of time and change; that with these

things would assemble an exhibit of feminine loveliness and masculine

perfection, of human freaks and human vanities, such as probably no

other planet could show.

The change began quickly enough, now. There was money to be made in

Hollywood—not only by producers, but by actors. On Broadway, men and

women with lean parts, or no parts at all, turned their eyes westward.

The exodus set in. The word “Hollywood” began to be passed about like

some magic bauble, a talisman. Once more, California held out to men and

women a lure of gold.

* * * * *

The little group of players on Sunset Boulevard hardly knew what to make

of the first incursion of “real actors” that swept in upon them. They

had two ideas about it: they wondered if they would be able to keep

their jobs, and if so, would they learn how to act. They realized,

presently, that it made very little difference to them. They did keep

their jobs, and they did not learn how to act—not in the stage way. It

was the newcomers who had to learn—if they stayed.

Most of them did stay—adapted themselves. Producers with new, big

undertakings, were all about. Griffith himself, returning from first

showings of the “Birth,” began on what promised to be a still more

important, more expensive, picture.

It started as rather a small venture, with Mae Marsh and Bobby Harron in

the leading parts. It was to be called “The Mother and the Law,” based

upon a famous murder case, wherein an innocent man, through

intolerance—man’s inhumanity to man—was brought to the foot of the

scaffold.

Lillian was not to have a part in this new play. For one thing, she was

working in another picture—as Annie, in “Enoch Arden”—one of the best of

her early films—and in Richard Harding Davis’ story of “Captain

Macklin.” And then, Griffith perhaps did not think it wise to push her

forward too fast.

But one night, after a day of hard rehearsal, he picked up a copy of

Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” and his eye caught:

... endlessly rocks the cradle,

Uniter of Here and Hereafter.

He saw a picture: a girl—Lillian—endlessly rocking the cradle of

humanity, binding the ages together—ages of human intolerance.

Feverishly, he mapped out a new scenario, far-reaching, comprehensive,

covering the great episodes of intolerance: back through the religious

wars, with the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, through the Crucifixion,

back to the days of Belshazzar, tyrant of Babylon. Beginning with the

modern story, he would lead it through episodes of tyranny and

bloodshed, down to the blind cruelty and intolerance of today. And

always, between, that young mother, endlessly rocking the cradle of the

child who, in every age, must pay the price.

The preparations for “Intolerance,” as the new production was now

called, were architecturally far more pretentious and costly than those

for “The Birth of a Nation,” or for any spectacle play up to that time.

Gigantic plaster elephants rose a hundred feet above the street level;

the towering buildings of Babylon stretched, a profile of ancient Asia,

across the sky. Nubian lions roared; a motley assemblage of Persians,

Egyptians, Babylonians, priests, dancing-girls, charioteers, and

fifty-seven other varieties, gathered for rehearsal. Says Griffith’s

biographer:

The luncheon hour “on location” composed one of the most

picturesque sights ever witnessed by human eyes. At times there

were as many as fifteen thousand men, women and children scattered

about the various lots during the noon hour. Thousands of horses

and sheep grazed along the green enclosures, their shaking heads

mingling with the flashing swords and helmets of the fighting-men.

When the great mob scenes were being photographed, it seemed as

though the entire population of Los Angeles had come out to

Griffith’s place, to take part in the various pageants and mighty

rushing armies. Actors from other studios—many of them prominent

stars—joined in the scenes.

The writer assures us that in spite of the fierce conflicts waged on the

parapets and walls and towers, only sixty-seven players were injured,

and these but slightly; also that a modern field hospital, with

surgeons, nurses and ambulances, was maintained.

Actors whose names were well known, or have since become so, first

appeared on the screen in “Intolerance”: Count Erich von Stroheim, Frank

Bennett, Tully Marshall, Constance Talmadge. Constance was an extra,

used at first for rehearsal, but presently—in the “Mountain Girl who

worshipped Belshazzar from afar”—Griffith could see only Constance, so

gave her the part.

Griffith had money to work with, now, and spent it like Belshazzar

himself. “Intolerance” required a year and a half to make, and an

expenditure of nearly two million dollars.

Some of the items are impressive: A jeweled costume for the “Princess

Beloved” cost seven thousand dollars; the dancing-girls at the feast of

Belshazzar, twenty-thousand—a good deal more than they ever cost that

early Belshazzar, even in his palmiest days, but of course these were

war prices.

“Intolerance” was shown for the first time at the Liberty Theatre, New

York, September 6, 1916. Its magnificence impressed the public. What

wouldn’t Griffith do next? On the night of April 6, 1917, Griffith

personally presented “Intolerance,” at the Drury Lane Theatre, London.

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

IX

THERE WERE NO LOVE AFFAIRS

Lillian did not consider that she was really in the new picture. To Nell

she wrote: “I am not in it in person, but my heart runs all through

it—and it seems more to belong to me than all my other work together.”

As of course it did—the mother who, through the ages, rocked humanity’s

cradle.

She had made a number of smaller pictures, meantime—very good pictures,

if we consult the notices, which even sometimes forgot to remember that

she was the “most beautiful blonde in the world.” How tired she had

become of that phrase! “If they want an angel on a wire, they send for

me,” she told one reporter, who managed to omit Belasco, though he did

call her “a young goddess” and a “daffodil.” You couldn’t stop them.

The pictures she made at this time were important only as they were

steps of development—program pictures, little remembered today. “Diane

of the Follies,” in which she played a kind of vamp and wore remarkable

costumes, was more memorable.

“But Diane was very easy to play,” she said afterwards. “Anybody can

play a character of that sort—it plays itself. It is the part of a good

woman, whose colorless life has to be made interesting, that is hard.”

Her own life could hardly be said to be exciting. There were no love

affairs. Plenty of opportunities, but she was always too busy for such

things, or for the social life, of which there was now a good deal. “I

was not gay enough for the parties; Dorothy was sought, for those. They

didn’t care much about me.” And once she wrote:

“When Dorothy goes to a party, the party becomes a party: When I go to a

party, I’m afraid it very often stops being a party.... She, as I once

heard a girl described in a play, is like a bright flag flying in the

breeze.

“All music, even the worst, seems so beautiful to her. All people amuse

her.... I have fun, too, but it is only the fun I get out of apparently

never-ending work.”

It was true, though: Work was her “fun”—work and study—always a book

under her arm: often a French one.

And being kind to those about her—that was fun, too. She never failed to

acknowledge the smallest service—from the electricians, the stage-hands,

the humblest property-boy. A friend of those days writes me:

“It was not only that Lillian was courteous to the electricians and the

rest; many actors are that ... she was just another workman. She

happened to be before the camera, that was all.”

The little Gish family had never lived in a house, always in an

apartment: in the Brentwood Apartments, and in the La Belle. But in the

autumn of 1915, they leased Denishawn, home of the dancer, Ruth St.

Denis, fitted for a school, plainly furnished, with dancing-floor,

horizontal bar and other equipment, all of which strongly appealed to

Lillian, who had been studying with Miss St. Denis, and could continue

her work there.

The owner had left the beginnings of a menagerie, which they completed.

At Christmas time that year, most of Lillian’s friends gave her live

things. A partial census shows an owl—one-eyed, gray—eight Japanese

finches, two parakeets, love-birds, two or three canaries, one little

poll-parrot; another, “John” (who, in 1932, still survives); also,

squirrels, a pair of golden pheasants, and a pair of peacocks that Miss

St. Denis had left.

They did not remain in Denishawn; the next paragraph explains why.

Lillian to Nell:

We have moved from that huge house I told you about. We were there

eight months, and during the last four, we had four burglars. One

was so bold as to come in through the dining-room window, all the

way upstairs into Mother’s room, at the improper hour of 2:30 in

the morning.

Being an old house with many squeaks, Mother knew all about him

before he made his appearance, and greeted him with two bullets,

the first of which hit the ceiling (she would have been terrified

if she had hit _him_), and the second went through the railing in

the hall. However, the man ran away, and the police never did

catch him. All this time I was out on the sleeping-porch,

petrified—could not utter a sound or move an inch. Oh, I am very

brave. Imagine, Nell, being awakened from a sound sleep by your

Mother tearing through the house, shooting a gun.

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

Mrs. Gish was not very well, and wanted only to have peace. She was

something of a financier; her business experience partly accounted for

that, though she was a natural economist.

“Your salaries,” she told Lillian and Dorothy, “are not income, but

merely an exchange in money for your natural capital of youth and

health. Salaries are capital, and all above actual needs should be

invested as such. The returns you get from investment are income.”

[Illustration: LILLIAN AS ELSIE STONEMAN, IN “THE BIRTH OF A NATION”]

Lillian and Dorothy were making very good salaries. The day of

spectacular earnings had not yet arrived, but two hundred and fifty or

three hundred dollars a week left a margin for banking. The little

troupers who had received ten to fifteen dollars a week, and lived on

less than half of it, began to feel themselves capitalists. This friend

and that suggested wonderful “buys,” and exhibited dividend slips. Then

the “olive grove” epidemic broke out. Everybody was investing in olive

groves, certain that every ten dollar share of stock would be worth

hundreds within a few years. Lillian considered this prospect, with

prayer and palpitations. The beautiful gray-green olive groves were

certainly very nice. She had a balance of three hundred dollars, and one

day hesitantly subscribed for that amount of stock. The palpitations

grew worse. Olive groves! Why, it would take ages, and there would be so

many olives, nobody would buy them. Besides, Lillian found she needed

the money. She went to the office of the olive growers, and stated her

case. A stout, good-natured man there listened quietly, regarded her

thoughtfully, and returned her investment. What an escape—the others did

not get their money back, and to date, dividends are shy.

By and by, when the three hundred had grown to as many thousand, another

epidemic was in the air. Oil! Everybody caught it, including Bobby

Harron, who was terribly in love with Dorothy and anxious to make the

whole Gish family rich. Mrs. Gish shook her head. There was a tract of

land which she thought promising. Lillian took a look at it, and was

unfavorably impressed. It was just dirt—unbeautiful with weeds, and

depressing tin cans. Bobby’s oil stock looked valuable, and had an

attractive name, something patriotic, like “Uncle Sam,” or “Union Jack.”

There is a superstition that any such name is a hoodoo, but Lillian and

Bobby did not know this—not then. When Bobby pulled out his next

dividend, Lillian fell.

That was about all: dividends hesitated after that, finally forgot to

arrive. The stock that she had bought around 60, was quoted around 3.

Bobby said it would “stage a grand come-back,” but to date it has not

done so. Bobby was a sweet soul, and they thought none the less of him.

“John,” the Gish parrot, to whom they had vainly tried to teach some

proper things to say, acquired for himself the disconsolate wail: “Oh,

dear! Oh, dear! Oh, dear!”

“_Why_ do you suppose he does that?” Lillian asked Harry Carr, a Los

Angeles newspaper man, of whom we are likely to hear again.

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

And the land? The dirt? Well, a lot of foolish people began to buy it

and to cover up the weeds and things with houses, which made a lot of

other foolish people want it, until its price increased ten, twenty,

an-hundred-fold!

X

THE NIGHTMARE OF WAR

Griffith, in England, wrote that he had wanted to enlist, but was being

urged by English officials, Lloyd George and others, to do a war picture

as propaganda. He might send for Lillian, soon.

“Intolerance” had made a stir in London, and the war situation had made

a stir in Griffith. Like his ancestors, he wanted to carry a gun—to go

into the trenches and pull a trigger. Lord Beaverbrook said to him:

“That is nonsense. You can do a thousand times more for the cause by

making a picture that will show the need of American intervention on the

largest possible scale.”

Griffith already had a story in mind—one he had planned on a night when

he had been reading of the German desolation of Belgium and the French

frontier.

“We will help you,” Lloyd George and other high officials told him. “We

will give you the use of our soldiers and training camps; we will put

you on the front lines in France.”

Griffith was ever a wary person. Never one to close a door behind him

... to make an irrevocable decision, to fire until charged and primed.

He wrote Lillian that he was looking for a location in Paris, guardedly

adding that he would not begin work until the war ended. On the strength

of which, Lillian, by this time in New York, paid a brief, happy visit

to Nell, then living on the “Blue Dog Houseboat,” at Miami.

Two weeks later, with her mother, she was on her way across the

Atlantic. In eight days they were in Liverpool where they sat down to

wait for Dorothy. It was not decided when they sailed that Dorothy was

to have a part in the new picture.

Dorothy sailed May 28. With her was Bobby Harron; also, Griffith’s

faithful camera man, Gottlieb Wilhelm Bitzer, a terrible name to carry

into England and France. The ship was the _Baltic_—General Pershing and

staff aboard.

“Tell me,” Pershing said to Dorothy, “how one can learn to face calmly a

moving-picture camera.” Everyone is afraid of something.

The _Baltic_ zigzagged across the ocean in thirteen days. Lillian and

her mother became frantic, waiting. Dorothy, arriving, was shocked at

her mother’s appearance. Her face was haggard with anxiety. Then,

presently, they were on their way to London.

It was the first time any of them had been abroad. England in June: the

tiny fields, the trim hedges, the stately trees, the thatched

villages—picture-book land. At London they went directly to the Savoy

Hotel, and were given a room on the Embankment, overlooking the Thames.

Little did they guess what they were to see from those windows. All

seemed quiet enough. They did some sight-seeing.

A few days later, they had a call from a post-office official,

concerning a package from America. A courteous man, they asked him about

the raids, on London. There would be no more, he said. The Zeppelins had

proved easy targets, the Germans would not send them again. And he

added: “Don’t mind if you should hear gun-fire at eleven o’clock; that

will be our anti-aircraft gun practice.”

[Illustration: MRS. GISH AND “HER GIRLS” Mary Pickford, Mildred Harris,

Mrs. Gish, Dorothy and Lillian]

Barely were the words out of his mouth, when there came a far-off boom

from the eastward. He looked at his watch. “Very extr’ord’nary,” he

said, “they are beginning the practice half-an-hour ahead of time.” A

moment later, he was gone.

The firing kept up. Lillian and Dorothy ran down the corridor, to a

balcony. A waiter, passing, told them that the East End was being

raided. He let them look through his binoculars. High in the air, to the

eastward, one could make out a small, black speck—eighteen thousand feet

up, he said.

They hurried down and got into a taxi, to see the raid. On the way to

Whitechapel, they came to a post-office which had been struck. A corner

of it was blown off—a number of persons killed. A great crowd had

collected. They were told that much greater damage had been done in

Whitechapel. They found there a schoolhouse, where ninety-six children

had been killed. Crazed mothers swarmed about, looking for fragments of

their dead.

Other bombs had fallen in the neighborhood. People were insane from

grief. A schoolmaster carried out his own child. A woman standing near

had just discovered that her boy was among the victims. Her face was

distorted—it was as if someone had pulled it out of shape.

XI

UNDER FIRE

With the one thought of getting out of London, Mary Gish and her

daughters went to Cambridge. But Cambridge, too, had been raided. At

night, streets and houses were pitch dark. No anti-aircraft guns. No

protection of any sort.

Two nights satisfied them. They returned to London, where for ten days

it was quiet enough. Then, one morning, Mrs. Gish, Lillian and Dorothy,

were awakened from sound sleep by a terrific explosion. They ran to the

windows. Coming up the Thames, in perfect formation, were twenty German

planes, flying in what seemed a slow and majestic manner, dropping bombs

as they came. They were so low that one could distinguish the crosses on

the under side of their wings. Mrs. Gish and her daughters watched them,

fascinated.

Were they afraid? Undoubtedly they were: with death hovering in the air,

likely to come plunging down at any moment, not many of the race—a race

blessed, or cursed, with imagination—could be wholly indifferent. The

rest of the party—Griffith, Bobby Harron and Gottlieb Wilhelm

Bitzer—came crashing in.

They supposed the planes would drop bombs on Waterloo Station, and

especially on the Hotel Cecil, headquarters of the English Flying Corps,

its roof covered with anti-aircraft guns. The Cecil was near them—next

door. Nothing of the kind happened. The German planes, undisturbed by

the shells fired at them, circled slowly around the Houses of

Parliament, without dropping a bomb; then, turning, left London. This

was on Saturday, July 8, 1917. The papers next morning reported

thirty-seven dead, one hundred and forty-one wounded—numbers probably

minimized. The Griffith party was shaken, dazed. It seemed incredible

that in a world supposedly civilized such things could happen.

There was no longer any rest. Raids came at night, and in relays. One

followed another—two and three in one night. They were meant to break

the English morale.

The first night raid was by glorious moonlight. Mrs. Gish, Lillian and

Dorothy, sitting in their apartment about ten, heard a distant booming,

then a far-off voice calling: “Take cover—take cover!” They merely sat

there, while the bombing came closer and closer, with aircraft guns

going. By and by it was over. Next morning, they heard that less damage

had been done than before, but enough.

About two nights later, as the girls stood in front of a dressing-table,

in their nightgowns—Mrs. Gish already in bed—there came from just under

their windows such an explosion as could not be described in words. The

electric lights in the bathroom went out—windows were shattered. They

rushed into the hall. All on that floor were there, in wild confusion.

They called to one another that the hotel had been struck. Then, from

outside, came a man’s scream. They had never realized how terrible a

man’s scream could be. Cries and groans followed. They stared their

inquiry into one another’s faces.

The bomb, they learned, had struck just by Cleopatra’s Needle, a few

yards distant. It had hit a tram and killed eleven persons, wounding

many others. The conductor had had his legs blown off. It was he who had

screamed, no doubt. Other bombs had fallen nearby. One on the little

Theatre on Adelphi Terrace; another at the Piccadilly Circus; still

another by Charing Cross Hospital. They had heard none of these, because

of the concussion in their ears from the one that had fallen beneath

their windows.

Lillian and Dorothy crept into one bed, shaking, unable to sleep. At

four they got up, dressed, saw the dawn breaking over London—workmen

going to their jobs. On the street, they found that many windows had

been blown from shops, the glass so finely shattered that it was like

snow. The girls said little, but listened to the comments of the working

people—comments not pleasant to hear.

The raids now came regularly. The nights became hideous nightmares.

Lillian and her mother seemed to get their nerve back. When the raids

came, they would take their pillows and go into their little foyer, to

try to get away from the noise. Dorothy took her pillow, too, but she

did not sit on it—she hugged it. Finally, it was September. They had

been there three months!

“... You cannot imagine, Nell, what terrible things those big things in

the sky are, dropping death wherever they go. If this war would only

end.... I am still here, and will live to see you and Tom and the babies

again, in spite of it. So don’t worry.”

Lillian went out a good deal, and, as was her habit, made a study of the

people ... to see how they acted under the stress and agony of war. She

went to the Waterloo Station, to watch them saying good-bye. Always she

was watching ... on the street ... everywhere.

XII

FRANCE

Days ... nights ... they seemed to have passed out of any world they had

ever known, into a sinister, topsy-turvy world, where murder and

destruction ruled.

Griffith down on the Salisbury plain, where there were great camps, was

already making portions of the picture. Returning, at last, to London he

escorted his little party down to Southampton, to take boat for France.

It was a transport, crowded with soldiers. Mrs. Gish and the girls were

in one tiny room, two in one bunk. Twice they started, and were sent

back because of floating mines. Finally they were at Havre, and next

evening at Paris, at the Grand Hotel.

Paris was dark—a place where almost anything could happen—but Griffith

and the girls somehow managed to grope their way about, to the river and

elsewhere. By daylight they did some shopping.

Griffith got the papers that would permit them to go to the fighting

area; then, one morning, with Mrs. Gish, Lillian and Dorothy, and Bobby

Harron, set out in an automobile, passed through the gates of Paris. In

an article for a home paper, Lillian described their journey:

Paris still has gates, just as you read about in the romantic

novels. There is a particular gate that leads to the war zone and

not a single, solitary human being can go through it unless he is

a soldier, or one who has business in the zone.

Can you imagine how important you feel when you go through that

gate? You find it very hard to believe that you are not just

acting in a “movie,” in a Los Angeles background that Mr. Huck,

the man who builds the moving-picture sets, has built—the road and

everything.

And how you do go! By tall poplar trees, by long fields of France.

France! Why, the very name is a poem and a romantic novel, all by

itself. Lombardy poplars! It sounds like an old-fashioned song.

Through the fields are the long lines of barbed wire. That is

where the trenches are. The very trenches that used to defend

Paris. Then, after fifteen minutes’ ride, you are where the French

stood in defense of Paris.... This is where the Germans were. They

came this far. This very road ... these very trenches are where

the men were.

But now you see the first town that the Germans bombed. You come

to the same kind of houses, blown all to pieces, wreck and ruin

everywhere. In one second-story, there was part of a bedstead

still left, and pieces of bed-clothes, that no one had taken the

trouble to pick up, after the French had come back. I can write

about it, and I can talk about it, and you can read about it,

until you are old and gray and sit in a rocking-chair, but you

could not understand it unless you saw it. Just streets, muddy and

deserted, and little graveyards of houses, hundreds of them.

You may not know it, but if you have been in one raid, or one

bombardment, where you hear the explosions coming closer and

closer, and you shake and shake and tremble and get sick at your

stomach, and dizzy, and lose your mind with fear, every moment,

you can imagine what it was to these people who had to endure it

for hours and days, and finally had their whole places blown away.

Were they running down the road we have been on, when this

happened? Sometimes they would not leave, because they did not

know where else to go. They could not believe it was true, anyhow,

and they stayed and stayed on.

The farther they went, the greater the desolation. They worked in

Compiègne and Senlis, and anyone who visited that neighborhood, even as

late as 1921, can form a dim idea of what it must have been in 1917.

Ruin everywhere, broken homes; furniture in fragments, and scattered.

Pieces of everything; clothing, little playthings, bits of lace, scraps

of another existence.

To the eastward, the guns were always going. All that part of France was

still subject to bombing raids. There were days when it was necessary to

take refuge with a little French family, in a bomb cellar. Lillian

wrote:

I have been in cellars myself, with a lot of other people around,

frightened to death, sitting close to Mama and Dorothy, who had

the shakes and whimpered as she used to when she was a baby,

because it was so terrible.

They learned a number of things: they learned to tell enemy planes, to

know shrapnel by its gray drift of smoke. They did not remain long in

that sector—only long enough to get the required pictures. Griffith went

to the front line, and made trench scenes—in the line itself. Then

directly they were all back in London, in the raids again. Apparently

they had not stopped ... they would never stop.

One night when the planes had been over three times, the noise was so

terrific that Dorothy suggested they go down into one of the ballrooms.

They found English officers and ladies strolling about, calm in their

English way, apparently not greatly concerned by the raid which was

still going on. Dorothy, nervously watching, saw a lovely girl about her

own age, come in. They looked at each other, at first without speaking.

Then the girl said:

“You are an American, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

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

They spoke of the horrors of the raids—of the one then going on.

Finally, Dorothy said:

“One thing I’m thankful for, I’m soon going back home, and will get away

from all this.”

The girl’s eyes grew big. She said:

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

“Afraid? After all this? At least, if one is hit by a torpedo, it’s

direct, and sure, and soon ended. In a raid like this, you never know.”

But the girl said:

“I can never imagine crossing the water again.”

“Why?”

“I was on the _Lusitania_, coming to England with a chaperon, to meet my

fiancé. I clung to a deck-chair for four hours. My chaperon was drowned

right beside me.”

Dorothy, telling of it afterwards, said:

“I did not know her name—I do not know it now. She never knew mine. She

had a look in her eyes she will carry the rest of her days.”

XIII

“HEARTS OF THE WORLD”

October found them safely home. After all their wish to get there,

America seemed a poor place: uninteresting, flat, tepid, futile—its

people had little idea of what was going on, “over there.” No wonder the

returning soldiers could not settle down to a humdrum life of work. It

was a thing next to impossible.

Mary Gish and her daughters found their nerves on a tension. Blasting in

the street made them jump. The strain had been terrible. Mrs. Gish had

lost thirty-five pounds—she would never be quite the same again.

Dorothy, by her own statement, had lost ten pounds. “Lillian is brave;

besides, she couldn’t afford to lose. She gained a whole pound.” Lillian

had no desire to go back, yet was sorry it was all over. Sometimes,

looking back, it seemed to her that she had been dreaming.

“Hearts of the World” was shown for a tryout at Pomona, California, on

Monday, March 11, 1918, and during the rest of the week at Clune’s

Auditorium, Los Angeles.

Both Lillian and Dorothy had studied and worked very hard for this

picture, and it had been obtained at the risk of their mother’s life and

their own. It deserved success, and it had it. Lillian, as the heroine

of the story, captured and mistreated, gave a beautiful and pathetic

presentation of her part. Dorothy, “the Little Disturber,” a strolling

singer, had a rôle suited to her gifts. A lute under her arm, she romped

through the war scenes with a jaunty swagger, which, set to music, was

irresistible. A London street-girl had provided the original. Lillian

discovered her one day, and followed her about, to copy her artistic

points. Bobby Harron was the hero-lover of the story—a very good story,

on the whole—though it was the ravage and desolation of war that was the

picture’s chief value.

On April 4, “Hearts of the World” was presented at the 44th Street

Theatre, before an invited audience. When, on the following evening, the

theatre was opened to the public, seats sold by speculators brought as

high as five and ten dollars. There were long runs everywhere. In

Pittsburgh, the picture broke all records for any theatrical attraction

in that city.

* * * * *

The writer of these chapters saw the film at this time, and again, with

Lillian, in 1931. A good deal of it was remembered vividly enough. It

had been the first World War picture, and it remained one of the best.

The trench fighting was terribly realistic. There were scenes taken on

the field that were war itself. Always, the action is swift. Toward the

end of the picture, where Lillian and Bobby are defending themselves

against a German assault, it becomes fairly breathless.

Throughout, the picture has a tender quality, in spite of its cruel

setting. But there are exceptions to this, one especially: Lillian in

the hands of a German, whipped because she cannot handle a big basket of

potatoes.

“Did the beating hurt?” I asked.

“Terribly. I was padded, but not nearly enough. My back bore the marks

for weeks. Mother was fearfully wrought up over it.”

She approved the picture, as a whole. Thought it better than many of

those made today. She was not far wrong. There was more sincerity of

intention—more earnest work. At one place, the heroine, through the

shock and agony of war, becomes mentally unhinged. Lillian’s portrayal

of the gradual approach of this broken condition was as fascinating as

it was sorrowful.

XIV

“BROKEN BLOSSOMS”

Lillian was entering a period of super-effort and success. Effort,

especially—at first. The indefatigable and relentless Griffith kept them

going, night and day. Hardly had he launched one war picture till he

made another. He had much war film left, and he built another story

around it. Two, in fact, though the second came somewhat later. While in

England, Queen Alexandra and a number of titled women had lent

themselves to the cause, by posing in arranged groups before the

Griffith cameras. In “The Great Love,” these films were used. “The

Romance of a Happy Valley,” and “True Heart Suzie” followed, idyllic

countryside pictures, with Lillian in tender comedy parts.

Griffith no longer directed her—not really. “I gave her an outline of

what I hoped to accomplish, and let her work it out her own way. When

she got it, she had something of her own. Of course, she was imitated. A

dozen actresses would copy whatever she did. They even got themselves up

to look like her. She had to change her methods.”

What a joy to work for Griffith! At night, in bed, you thought out your

part, and mentally rehearsed it—over and over. Then, next day, you tried

it, and when at last it was “shot,” you eagerly looked, a day or two

later, for the “rushes,” to see what you had done. Sometimes it was

pretty bad—not at all what you had expected. Never mind, that was the

advantage of playing for the pictures: you could see yourself, and

correct your mistakes. You could do it over and over—Griffith was never

stingy with film. He nearly always made twenty times what he used. He

would let you try, and keep trying, until both you and he were

satisfied. He knew that you had studied the lights, and angles, and

groupings—that you had something definite in mind. Often, he consulted

you—sometimes let you direct a scene.

* * * * *

It was during the summer of 1912 that Lillian had begun work with

Griffith, at the old Biograph studio on Fourteenth Street. Now, almost

exactly seven years later, she arrived at what may be called the crest

of her film career. Not suddenly: she had been climbing steadily,

working like a road-builder, almost from the first day. Now she had

reached the top, that was all.

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

When anyone asks me to pick out from the many I have been in, the

picture I like best, I answer without much hesitation, and without

much thought, “Broken Blossoms.” I say this not because the

picture was an artistic picture, which it was. I say this not

because it was a compelling or tragic story with no clearing-away,

no laying of tracks, no getting ready for the tragedy—it was

exactly all this; but because the picture was quickly and smoothly

accomplished. It took only eighteen days to film.

She does not say that it was her most notable characterization, and in

the broader sense, it may not rank with some of her later work: with

Mimi, for instance, in “La Bohême”; with Hester Prynne, in “The Scarlet

Letter.” Nevertheless, it is the film rôle for which she will be longest

remembered, the part that for artistic conception and delineation and

sheer beauty has not been surpassed, either by herself, or by any other.

To this day, the magazines reproduce flashes from the now immortal

closet scene of “Broken Blossoms,” as the “highest example of screen

realism.”

“Broken Blossoms,” a poetic tragedy of the Chinese slums of London, was

a film adaptation of “The Chink and the Child,” from Thomas Burke’s

collection entitled “Limehouse Nights.” Griffith and Lillian recognized

its possibilities, and what she could make of the part of the “Child.”

She at first thought the part too young for her, but agreed to try it.

The story is that of a brutal father, a pugilist, who beats and

browbeats his twelve-year-old daughter until she has become a terrified,

trembling little creature, a stunted human semblance, with a

pathetically lovely face. A young Chinese, drift of the quarter, out of

pity and adoration for her loveliness, one day gives her shelter, when,

after a beating, she staggers into his poor shop. The ending involves

the tragic death of all of them, the final scene being one of exquisite

art. This is Griffith’s version, but the character of Lucy Burrows is

the same in both. This bit is from Burke’s story:

... always in her step and in her look was expectation of dread

things; ... yet for all the starved face and transfixed air, there

was a lurking beauty about her, a something that called you in the

soft curve of her cheek, that cried for kisses and was fed with

blows, and in the splendid mournfulness that grew in eyes and

lips.

In the world of drama, there are rôles which the competent artist

“creates”—well, or less well—and makes his own; there are rôles—oh,

rarely enough—which are his from the beginning, created _for_ him:

“Disraeli,” for George Arliss—“The Music Master,” for David Warfield. I

have told my story very badly if the reader does not recognize that for

Lillian Gish, the character of Lucy Burrows offered such a part: a part

such as would not come to her during more than another ten years, and

then, not for the screen.

* * * * *

To a young man named Richard Barthelmess, lately a graduate of Columbia

College, Griffith gave the part of the “Chinaman,” because he was rather

small, very good-looking, with a face that could make up “Chinese.” To

Donald Crisp, an Englishman (he had been General Grant in “The Birth of

a Nation”), he gave the part of Battling Burrows. Crisp was a realistic

person, and had a face that in full war-paint was a thing to put fear

into the stoutest heart.

Lillian was just over the influenza—not equal to the strenuous Griffith

rehearsing. Carol Dempster, who had been a dancer in “Intolerance,”

rehearsed the part under his direction. Lillian rehearsed with

Barthelmess, earning his gratitude.

“It was my first important picture,” Barthelmess said recently, “and I

was anxious to do it well. Lillian had had six or seven years’

experience, and she was the soul of patience.” Reflectively, he added:

“Lillian, Dorothy, and Mary Pickford are the three finest technicians of

the screen. I learned more from Lillian than from any other person,

except Griffith.”

The labor of production began. Lillian had been promised that she could

work short hours, with nine hours each night for sleep. But of course,

Griffith could not stick to that. He could not keep away from the

studio; nor could the others.

It was during this strenuous period that Lillian evolved what Griffith

calls “the one original bit of business that has been introduced into

the art of screen acting.” In his ghastly preparation for beating Lucy,

Battling Burrows pauses, and commands her to smile. Griffith and Lillian

had discussed how this could be done most effectively. Then, in the

midst of the scene, Lillian had an inspiration: Lifting her hand, she

spread her fingers and pushed up the corners of her mouth. The effect

was tremendous. “Do that again!” shouted Griffith, and they repeated the

scene until they got that heart-wringing bit of technique to suit them.

Griffith couldn’t get over it.

Another classic bit is where the cringing Lucy, to arrest her father’s

hand, looks up in an agony of pleading terror:

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

The closet scene was the climax—the terrible moment where Lucy’s father

is breaking in, to kill her. Nobody could rehearse that for her. For

three days and nights, she rehearsed it almost without sleep. Small

wonder, then, that the hysterical terror of the child’s face was

scarcely acting at all, but reality. It is said that when the scene was

“shot,” there was an assemblage of silent, listening people outside the

studio, awe-struck by Lillian’s screams. Griffith, throughout the scene,

sat staring, saying not a word. Her face, during the final assault and

struggle, became a veritable whirling medley of terror, its flashing

glimpses of agony beyond anything ever shown before or since on the

screen. When it was ended, Griffith was as white as paper.

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

[Illustration: LILLIAN GISH AND RICHARD BARTHELMESS IN “BROKEN

BLOSSOMS”]

“What impressed us all,” writes Harry Carr (he had become Griffith’s

assistant), “was that all her reactions were those of a child. Her wild

terror in the closet scene—the finest example of emotional hysteria in

the history of the screen—was the terror of a child.” Carr further

remembers that she had been to several hospitals, to study hysteria, and

to inquire how one would be likely to die, from beating.

* * * * *

Griffith was not quite sure what to do with “Broken Blossoms.” He

believed it a great artistic success, but it was unusual, tragic: It

might win great and instant approval; it might be an utter failure.

Harry Carr and Arthur Ryal, the latter a well-known press agent, urged

him to take it to New York. Griffith agreed, and took everybody with

him. Morris Gest, who saw it at a private showing, “went quite mad” over

it: “Greatest picture the world has ever seen—charge what you please for

it. You can pack the house at any cost.” They agreed that two and three

dollars would be the proper figure.

XV

“I WORK SUCH LONG HOURS”

“Broken Blossoms” was first shown as the initial offering of Griffith’s

“repertory season” at the George M. Cohan Theatre, New York, May 13,

1919, before as distinguished an audience as had ever assembled in a

Broadway theatre. There was not a hitch anywhere. The film was

mechanically perfect; it was accompanied by special haunting music. The

Chinese scenes showed an effect of pale blue lighting. Griffith, Lillian

and Barthelmess were present. When the picture ended, its success

assured, Morris Gest darted back stage, kicked over chairs, waved his

arms, wept and laughed hysterically. The Sun, next evening, called it

the “most artistic photoplay yet produced.” The Tribune said: “_It is

the most beautiful_ motion picture we have ever seen, or ever expect to

see. When it was over, we wanted to rush up to everyone we met and cry:

‘Oh, don’t miss it, don’t miss it!’” There was a great deal more in the

same strain, echoed by every critic. The elder Schildkraut said of it:

“I have seen every actress of Europe and America during the last half

century. Lillian Gish’s scene in the closet, where she is hiding in

terror from her brutal father, is the finest work I have ever

witnessed.”

* * * * *

And Lillian: if she had been no more than widely popular before, she was

indubitably famous now. All day long, reporters and photographers waited

outside her rooms at the Commodore. Invitations piled on her table. What

a commotion!

“Life,” she wrote Nell, “is just one long photograph and interview.” Was

she all they said? “Queen of the Silent Drama”? “Duse and Bernhardt of

the Screen”? How could anyone be both? And why must she be anybody but

herself? Still, it was rather fun to have them say those things;

gratifying, too. Was she the little girl who such a brief while ago had

lost her little telescope bag, running for a train, and slept on the

station benches—tired, so tired?

She was tired, now. And there seemed no resting place. Almost

immediately back in Los Angeles, she was writing Nell:

“I work such long hours. Sometimes I don’t even see Mother for days. Can

you imagine us living in the same house and hardly seeing one another?

“I must go to the studio, now, to have what I hope will be my last

interview for years. I certainly was not made to be famous, it is

beginning to get on my nerves.”

Somewhat later, she wrote:

Nell, we don’t belong to that set where they think they buy

happiness with dollars. I think that is why I didn’t like New

York, this time—though of course I shouldn’t say that, as they

were wonderful to me, both the press and the people....

The studio gave a party for Mr. Griffith, Saturday night; all the

stage-hands, electricians and working men, their wives and

families, and of course the actors, and such. It reminded me of

Massillon—was just such a party as we would have there—bright

studio, all decorated with lanterns, and music playing, dancing,

sandwiches, _baked beans_, ice-cream.... Madam (the colored lady

who cleans the place) sang and danced. Dick, Dorothy and Bobby

acted the fool—it was just a foolish party.

Her taste was for her friends, her work—the simple, daily round. Did she

sometimes stop to look back over the way she had come, and along a royal

road that stretched before? I think not often. She was not a dreamer in

that sense. When fan letters praised her to the skies, when the

newspapers labeled her “The World’s Darling,” she was pleased, no doubt,

but kept her balance; and sometimes, about three in the morning, she

found it no trouble to remember that “the world’s darling” was just a

frail, little figure, huddled in the dark, trying to get to sleep.

XVI

DIRECTOR LILLIAN

Griffith now took an important step. He removed himself and his players

from California to New York, really to Mamaroneck, on Long Island Sound,

where he had leased the old Flagler mansion and grounds, and contracted

for a studio, soon to be completed. The mansion itself would serve for

the executive offices, possibly for occasional scenes of grandeur.

Lillian and her mother made the transcontinental journey with Harry

Carr, now Griffith’s right-hand man. Their train passed through

Massillon, but at lightning speed. Carr remembers that all the way

across the country, Lillian looked forward to this splendid moment, and

though very late, refused to go to bed until it had passed.

She was greatly excited, and kept trying to point out things to

me, though you couldn’t see anything but the ticket office. I was

impressed by how much of the child she had.

Lillian, with her mother and Dorothy, established themselves at the

Hotel Commodore, to be handy to the Grand Central Station, and thus

within thirty minutes of Mamaroneck. It was costly, and sometimes they

planned to have a farm near the studio: “five acres, with pigs, cows,

chickens, horses.” At least, it was something to dream about, for

Spring.

Griffith, having got his new studio about ready, conceived the notion of

making two pictures in Florida, neither of them with a part for

Lillian—a great disappointment, for Nell still lived on the Blue Dog

houseboat, at Miami.

However, there were compensations: Griffith wanted a picture made in his

absence, and agreed to let Lillian direct it. To direct had been her

ambition.

“I have changed my career,” she wrote Nell, “—am a director; yes, am

directing Dorothy’s next picture; will start Friday—have the story all

rehearsed, and will start taking, then.”

They had done the story themselves, she and Dorothy. It had been partly

inspired by a piece of “business” that Dorothy had found in a comic

magazine: A husband had complained to his wife that she wore such dowdy

clothes, no one would notice her on the street. When they went out

again, the wife walked a few steps ahead and made faces at every man she

met, with the result that all looked at her, much interested.

“We decided to make a picture around that situation”—Lillian telling the

story—“and call it ‘She Made Him Behave.’ We were always looking for

picture possibilities—particularly for leading men. James Rennie was at

the moment in New York, disengaged, and was very glad to get the

part—his first picture. When I first proposed directing a picture for

Dorothy, Griffith said: ‘Why do you want to break up your happy home?’

meaning that Dorothy and I would fall out over it. We took the chance,

and he went away and left us.”

“He went away and left us!” She was barely twenty-three. However

well-versed she was in the technique of picture-making, she had never

directed an entire picture. She was taking over a new and untried

studio; she was assuming the responsibility of spending what was at

least a modest fortune. Moreover, Griffith had never seen the script of

the picture, for with Harry Carr to help, they made many incidents and

scenes as they went along. The fact that Griffith was content to go away

and leave the venture in her hands, implies two things: First, that his

confidence in Lillian was large; second, that the motion-picture

business is conducted on less rigid lines than other important

enterprises. Both conclusions are warranted: Griffith did know Lillian,

and the motion-picture industry is conducted like no other business on

earth.

To begin with, it is not really a business at all—not merchandising. You

are not buying something which you are to sell again. You are creating

something—painting a canvas, doing it with human beings. Your

accessories are mechanical, but even here, the personal element is a

chief factor—the enthusiasm and good-will of the photographers, the

electricians, the stage-hands. Griffith believed that Lillian could

shape these to her taste. On the set, they were her friends. She called

them by their intimate studio names: “Slim,” “Whitey,” “Joe,” and so on,

and never left a set that she did not go to each one, and in her grave,

dignified little way, thank him for the help he had been to her.

But let Lillian continue:

“I believed that no director had brought out Dorothy’s sweetness,

especially her comic sense. I believed I could do it. Of course, I had

been in pictures a number of years, and knew something about directing,

but nothing at all of practical mechanics. I knew nothing of the

measurements for a set, and was afraid the company would lose respect

for me if they found it out. I went home and paced the floor of my room,

measuring the number of feet, to try to get some idea of what I wanted

to talk about when I got back to the studio. As a result, I ordered a

room that was too big for the height of it. The camera couldn’t get far

enough away, without shooting over the back wall. The camera-man, who

had come from the war with a case of shell-shock, would walk up and down

and throw his hat on the floor, and declare he couldn’t stand it. But he

was really very kind, and we learned something every day.

“But then the worst developed. Mr. Griffith had bought an engine to

transform alternating to direct current, and when we were ready to shoot

the picture, we didn’t have enough ‘juice’ for the lights. We had to put

a wire all the way from Mamaroneck, on poles, a costly job. Still it

wouldn’t do. We were promised the power, but we didn’t get it. Sunday

was my big day. Our picture had a wedding party, and I could get extras

from Mamaroneck, thirty or forty of them, at two dollars a day; then,

when we were ready, our lights failed us. It would be six o’clock in the

evening before we could do anything. Perhaps not even then.”

Desperate as was the situation, she appears never to have lost her

nerve. In a letter from Harry Carr, always present, we gather that her

mechanical assistants were most concerned.

The kindness she had shown to the rough-necks came ripe. They

almost worked themselves to the bone for her. When anything went

wrong, they looked ready to faint in a body. Lillian would sit

hour after hour, alongside the camera, waiting for the lights to

come on. One day she sat there uncomplainingly, from nine o’clock

in the morning until eleven at night, without a flicker of light.

Uncomplainingly, but what must have been going on inside. There was a

small studio in New Rochelle, the Fischer studio. It was a poor thing,

but at least there were lights. The Mamaroneck electric people promised

that if she would work there a few days, everything would be all right

when she got back. So they carted themselves and their sets to New

Rochelle, and began again.

“It was certainly a poor place,” Lillian remembered; “Damp, the cellar

full of water, no heat, and being late November and into December, it

was very cold. Often, the actors had to hold their breath so it wouldn’t

photograph. The next Sunday we all moved back to Mamaroneck. The lights,

they told us, were all right, but that was a mistake. Back we went to

the Fischer studio. In all, we moved back and forth three times. I very

nearly lost my mind.

“Of course, I was responsible, and spending money—oh, by the thousands.

Mr. Epping, our business manager, every night brought me the items of

what we had spent that day. I am not much at figures, but I could read

the total, which was not cheerful. But everybody stood by me, the

‘boys,’ as we then called the electricians and property men, especially.

The actors, too—everybody.

“The last day’s work had to be done on Fifth Avenue, New York. It

happened to come on the day before Christmas, and I didn’t want to

postpone it. We engaged a bus, from which Dorothy had to look down and

see her ‘husband’ ride by in a cab with another woman. To work on the

street without a permit laid us open to arrest and fine, with a good

chance of spending Christmas in jail. To get a permit would take time,

which we could not afford. ‘Will you take a chance?’ I asked those who

were going to do the scene. They agreed that they would, but things had

a dubious look.

“Nevertheless, we got our bus and our taxicab, and started. I was on the

bus with the camera-man—George Hill, now a famous director—Dorothy at

the other end, the taxi just below. We had not gone a block when an

enormous policeman started over, to see what it was all about. Then he

took a good look at me and stopped, placed his fingers at the corners of

his mouth and ‘put up’ a smile.

“You remember the scene in ‘Broken Blossoms,’ where the brutal father

commands his terrified daughter to smile. I knew right away the big

policeman had seen it. He really smiled, then, and so did I. ‘Oh, it’s

you, is it?’ he said. ‘Yes, and this is my sister, Dorothy, and we’re

trying to finish a picture before Christmas.’ ‘Go right on,’ he said.

Farther up the Avenue, another policeman called out: ‘What do you think

you’re doing up there?’ I put up the smile myself, that time, hoping he

had seen the picture. Evidently he had, for he laughed and waved us

along. I thought it safer not to break any new ground, so we turned and

made the circuit. We made it several times, and were not troubled again,

but helped.

“That night we knew we were done, and everybody was so happy, and so

sorry, weeping on one another’s shoulders. By the time Mr. Griffith came

home, our picture was nearly all cut, and ready. When he saw and

approved of it, I was very happy, but it had nearly killed me.”

Lillian decided that directing was not for women. “Remodeling a

Husband,” as the picture was finally called, turned out a financial

success. She had spent fifty-eight thousand dollars, and twenty-eight

days, making it, but it netted a profit of a hundred and sixty thousand

dollars, and doubled Dorothy’s picture value. She was proud of all that,

but did not care to try it again. A little while ago David Wark Griffith

said: