“The Scarlet Letter” had its première in August, 1926, at the Central

Theatre, New York City. The evening _Sun_ next day, among other things,

said:

Miss Gish, for the first time in the memory of the oldest

inhabitant of the cinema palaces, plays a mature woman, a woman of

depth, of feeling and wisdom and noble spirit.... She is not

Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne, but she is yours and mine, and she

makes ‘The Scarlet Letter’ worth a visit.

The _Sun_ man’s notice was a fair sample of other printed opinions at

home and abroad. Critics who were anxious to show that they were

familiar with Hawthorne, sometimes worked themselves up over the

departure from the original story, and sometimes “took it out” on

Lillian and Lars Hansen, but generally they had only good things to say

of the acting of these two, of little Joyce Coad and the others, and of

Seastrom’s fine direction. Seastrom had created New England atmosphere

on a Culver City lot, a fact not always suspected. Lillian had hoped

that some of the scenes might really be made in New England, but

Seastrom’s imagination had served as well—perhaps better. No fault was

found here—indeed, very little anywhere. Critics who went prepared to do

their worst, forgot all about it when they saw Lillian in her little

Puritan cap, her expressive back in its little Puritan waist, and

especially when she sat in the stocks, “for running and playing on ye

Sabbath,” leaning feverishly out to drink from the cup of cold water

brought her by the conscience-stricken minister. One hardened critic

wrote:

I retire from the field with tears in my eyes and rage in my

heart, as becomes a cynic betrayed and undone. To consider her

critically is beyond my powers—she simply annihilates the

instinct. Of this much I am quite sure: She is a great, a very

great artist, and by far the most appealing and human little

figure appearing on the screen today—and the loveliest.

[Illustration: “THE SCARLET LETTER” Miss Gish as Hester Prynne, with the

shadow of Lars Hansen, as Dimmesdale]

Three or four years ago, in a big barn of a theatre in Southern France,

the writer of these pages first saw “The Scarlet Letter” and went home

in a daze, waking up now and then to damn his Puritan ancestors. In the

seat next his, had sat a small, intense Frenchwoman, who, at one point,

had said, tearfully, to her companion: “Regardez, Léontine, regardez son

pauvre petit dos!” (Look, Leontine, look at her poor little back!) And

just now I read a paragraph which said: “Lillian Gish can convey more

pathos with her back than any other actress with all her features.”

I agree with that, and I am not going by my first impression. I have

seen the picture again—very recently, with Lillian, in the New York

Metro-Goldwyn projection room. Association had destroyed none of the

illusion. The effect was the same—heightened.

We left the crash and glare of Ninth Avenue for the comparative

seclusion of a cab. Lillian said, presently:

“I was too immature to play that part. She was a woman. I looked just

like a child.”

“You looked young, certainly, but not too young for Hester—that Hester.

Of course, the real Hester—supposing there ever was one—was not at all

your Hester. She was less—more—what the others were.”

She assented, a little doubtfully. I stumbled on:

“If I might offer a humble opinion, you did not turn Lillian Gish into

Hester Prynne; you turned Hester Prynne into something—well—something

more exquisite.”

“Some of the critics didn’t think so; they said——”

“I know the things they said. I have those scrapbooks, where you

carefully preserved all the worst ones. A critic—a young critic—does not

think he is doing his duty unless he puts a little sting into what he

writes. The cup he offers must have its drop of hemlock, even when he

proffers it on bended knee.”

* * * * *

“La Bohême” and “The Scarlet Letter” were popular abroad. From Europe,

from the farthest East, the letters came. Oriental young men, in

exquisite calligraphy and quaint phrase, told her how she was adored,

begged for a photograph, a written line. Some suggested pictures they

hoped she would do—“Joan of Arc” among them.

VII

“THE FIRST LADY OF THE SCREEN”

During Lillian’s absence in England, a scenario for a new picture bad

been prepared for her, based on the song of “Annie Laurie,” believed to

have a wide human appeal. All the sets were ready, the costumes had only

to be fitted. The day of her arrival, Lillian went to the studio, and

next day began on the scenes. Lillian and Miss Moir agree that it was a

fearfully hot summer, and that the velvet costumes for Annie weighed

fifteen pounds each. Lillian did not care much for the story, and cared

for it a good deal less when she learned that Bonnie Annie Laurie, for

whom someone had been ready to lie down and die, had, in her later

years, turned into an old gossip. Of course, in the picture, her lover

is a member of another clan, and there is the usual treachery, with a

great deal of confused fighting, and struggling through artificial snow

which, in that deadly heat, just about blistered your fingers when you

touched it. But Lillian was faithful, and did her sweltering best.

One Sunday, Miss Moir, thinking how much it would be appreciated by the

company, “on location,” drove out there with several gallons of

ice-cream. Unfortunately, that day, rehearsal broke up early. She met

Lillian on the road, but two girls couldn’t eat all those gallons of

cream, and for some reason the rest of the company failed to

materialize. They tried to give the surplus away, to passersby, but when

several had haughtily refused, they dropped the rest into a ditch.

“Annie Laurie,” first given at the Embassy Theatre, New York, May 10,

1927, appears to have been well received. As usual, the notices spoke of

Lillian as “lovely,” and “winning,” and “charming,” but they lacked the

enthusiasm of those written of Hester and Mimi, and they were doubtful

of the picture itself.

The reason is clear enough: the tame, or partially tame, Scot of today,

has commendable points; he knows about engines, and Greek, and often

plays a fair game of _gowf_. But the range species of some centuries

ago, was a good deal different—an unprepossessing, evil-smelling, hairy

type, who had clans and feuds and delighted in running off his enemy’s

cattle, or cannily luring him into a cave and smoking him to death, or,

as in this instance, into a castle, to murder him in cold blood. That

earlier Scot was hardly the thing to offer to a delicately-nurtured

picture audience. Even Norman Kerry as Ian MacDonald, even Lillian as

Annie Laurie, could not make him palatable.

* * * * *

Lillian, however, was riding on the top wave. An English company offered

her the lead in “The Constant Nymph”; a great German company offered the

part of Juliet: “Cannot tell you how delighted we should be, if the

remotest possibility”; de la Falaise offered her the part of Joan of

Arc, in a picture for which Pierre Champion, the great French authority

on Joan, had prepared the scenario. To the last named, she replied that

she had long been considering the part of Joan, and put the matter aside

with real regret.

And many wanted to write of her. Whatever she did, or was about to do,

was news. A magazine, _Liberty_, sent a gifted young man, Sidney

Sutherland, all the way to the Coast to see her. He had expected to do

one, possibly two, articles, but his editors asked for more, and under

the general title of “Lillian the Incomparable” continued his

chapters—“reels” as he not inaptly termed them—through nine weekly

installments!

On any excuse, and with no excuse at all, other than what it presented,

and stood for, periodicals carried her picture. _Vanity Fair_ published

a full front-page portrait, by Steichen, nominating her “The First Lady

of the Screen.”

Miss Moir says that she was always being approached by lovesick young

men, anxious to find out all they possibly could about the object of

their affections.

They wanted to know what she ate, what she read, what she did

after studio hours, what she talked about. I did the best I

tactfully could to gratify their curiosity, but I well remember

the look of pained surprise which came over the face of one

admirer when I told him that Lillian took a cold plunge every

morning, exercised vigorously and did a really spirited

Charleston. I suppose this was all contrary to his idea of what

such a fragile, ethereal being should do.

Flowers were always arriving, enough to start a florist’s shop. And

permanent gifts—anonymous ones, some of them, and of great value: a

large, magnificent fire opal set with diamonds; an exquisite point lace

shawl, so perfectly suited to her personality that the donor must have

had taste as well as an opulent purse.

Photographers were always besieging her to pose for them, and painters.

The latter rarely caught her personality. It was such an elusive thing.

The quick camera was better at it. Frequently, too, she was caricatured,

and it is only fair to say that most of the caricatures were among the

best of the results—strikingly like her: “more like me than I was like

myself,” she said.

She shared her success with those less fortunate—gave freely, money,

advice to young aspirants, help to sister-players and would-be

players—provided jobs for them. One day a girl with a face a good deal

like her own, and the fairy name of Una Merkel, came to see her. Screen

fans know Una Merkel very well today, but perhaps not many know that she

is a poet. One Christmas, in appreciation of what Lillian had done for

her, she wrote and had beautifully printed on a card of greeting, some

verses, two of which follow:

TO LILLIAN GISH

If I could breathe on canvas white my dreams,

I’d dip my fancy into tubes which held

Life’s colors—pure, of sheerest loveliness,

Then—I’d paint—you.

I’d borrow of the Lily its perfume,

Of day—the misty beauty of its dawn;

Then of the world I’d take a tear—a smile,

And I’d have—you.

VIII

“WIND”

There had appeared an anonymous novel (later acknowledged by Dorothy

Scarborough), a tale of sickening horror, entitled “Wind.” It was the

story of a young, refined Southern girl, who goes to Texas in an earlier

day; is made desperate by the wind and blowing sand and hard human

circumstance; marries a rough cowboy; is violated by a man she had met

on the train; murders him and goes mad—a category of black disaster.

It was regarded as fine material for a picture, well-suited to motion

photography, because of the wild, tireless wind—perfect symbol of

motion, and of the fierce action of the story. A director, Clarence

Brown, was highly enthusiastic over the possibilities of “Wind” on the

screen, but a favorable decision might have been less quickly reached

had all the conditions been foreseen. For making the picture was an

experience nearly as desolating as the story. When the studio scenes

were finished, a trek of wagons, trucks and motor busses, loaded with

paraphernalia, an entire company of actors, a big crew of technical

assistants, mechanics, etc., the whole accompanied by eighty mounted

cowboys, invaded the blistering Mojave Desert, in the cause of art.

Mr. Brown, after all, was not to direct. He had been sent off to Alaska,

on the “Trail of ’98,” and could not, it seemed, finish it. Victor

Seastrom was given the direction of “Wind,” and again Lars Hansen was

Lillian’s leading man. Satisfactory as far as it went. They had waited a

long time on Brown—until they could wait no longer. Spring had come. The

Mojave in midsummer was unthinkable. So that big procession one morning

got in motion.

It was May, and it was hot. Arriving at Mojave, the men took up quarters

in a train that had been shunted onto a disused siding—Lillian, Miss

Moir and a few others in a flimsy little hotel, opposite the tracks,

where engines switched and banged most of the night long. It was a

Harvey hotel, which was the best that could be said for it; the food at

least would be good. Cool enough at first, the weather presently became

unbearably hot. Whereupon a new difficulty presented itself: Film

coating melted from the celluloid. No developing could be done with the

thermometer at 120 in the shade. They tried freezing the films, but this

made them brittle, like thin glass. Finally, they packed them, frozen,

and rushed them by special cars to the Metro laboratories, one hundred

and forty miles away, to be carefully thawed out.

And the human misery of it! Miss Moir writes:

Quivering veils of heat lay over the desert, there was no shade

anywhere, and a burning wind blew all day long, raising blisters

on your face, taking every bit of skin off your lips. I shall

never forget the appearance of the crew during that picture. To

protect their faces from the sun they all wore a heavy blackish

make-up while their cracked and swollen lips were covered with

some sort of white stuff. Add to this goggles, and handkerchiefs

tied round their necks, and you can imagine that most desperate

looking gang to be seen anywhere on that desert. When the studio

executives saw the first rushes they were so horrified at Lars

Hansen’s unromantic appearance that they ordered the whole

sequence to be done again and Lars Hansen to appear shaven and

clean, as they argued that no girl could possibly entertain

romantic thoughts for such a hairy ruffian.

The cowboys added interest and excitement to the adventure. Long,

lean blasphemous individuals, reckless of everything, gambling the

minute they were not needed for a scene.

To which Lillian adds:

“It was the very worst experience I ever went through. Temperature 120

in the shade. In the sun...? One man burned his hand quite badly opening

the door of a motor. We had eight wind machines, and in the studio, to

match up with the blowing sand outside (supposed to be blowing in the

doors and windows), we used sulphur pots, the smoke giving the effect of

sand blowing in. The sand itself was bad enough, but the pots were

worse. I was burned all the time, and was in danger of having my eyes

put out. The hardships of making ‘Way Down East’ were nothing to it. My

hair was burned and nearly ruined by the sulphur smoke. I could not get

it clean for months. Such an experience is not justified by any

picture.”

Nature seems to have wearied of their evil-smelling feeble devices, and

one day gave an example of what she could do herself. Miss Moir,

graphically:

A few days before we finished the scenes up there it turned cold.

Towards the end of the afternoon work was stopped by a terrific

sandstorm. A howling wind, which soon assumed the proportions of a

hurricane, tore down from the mountains sending the sand whirling

in dense masses before it. The sky was black and everything was

obscured by a veil through which we could dimly perceive the

figures of the cowboys bent forward on their saddles, horse and

rider braced against the oncoming fury, making for camp. There was

an extraordinary beauty about the scene, as Lillian and I stood

for a moment and watched it before getting into the car, and I

could appreciate the feeling in her voice when she said “Oh, how I

wish Mr. Griffith was here. How he would have loved to photograph

that.”

All night long the storm raged while our shaky little hotel

quivered to its foundations. As we lay in bed trying vainly to

sleep, we could see the flimsy walls of the hotel bending before

the onslaught, and in the morning the room was full of sand which

had leaked in through every crevice of the ill-built structure.

This was exactly what they had come up there to produce, but apparently

they made no use of it. One remembers Griffith waiting for the blizzard

in New England, and echoes Lillian’s heartfelt utterance. The day had

come when Nature’s effects were no longer in favor—were even resented,

as an imitation; and one who has seen the picture must confess that

those eight wind machines were not easily to be outdone.

The most depressing of Lillian’s films, “Wind,” is one of the

best—beautiful in its sheer ferocity. Nemirovitch Dantchenko,

distinguished manager, playwright and producer, of the Moscow Art

Theatre, being then in Hollywood, after a preview of it, wrote as

follows:

I want once more to tell you of my admiration of your genius. In

that picture, the power and expressiveness of your portrayal begat

real tragedy. A combination of the greatest sincerity, brilliance

and unvarying charm, places you in the small circle of the first

tragediennes of the world.... One feels your great experience and

the ripeness of your genius.... It is quite possible that I shall

write [of it] again to Russia, where you are the object of great

interest and admiration by the people.

[Illustration: “WIND” Letty, burying the man she had killed]

For some reason, “Wind” was not released until late in the year. When it

finally appeared, the time for it was brief—the talking picture was

ready to invade the land—but that story—a sad one—we shall come to a

little later.

* * * * *

Lillian’s last silent picture, “The Enemy,” a war picture, laid in

Vienna—not very startling—closed her two-year contract with the Metro

company. She was to have made six pictures, but they were unable to give

them to her. Both sides were satisfied, however, and parted on the

pleasantest terms. Only too gladly, Lillian would have made another

picture, had conditions been otherwise. The company on its part had no

word of complaint, even paid her for one day extra time, something over

a thousand dollars, a complete surprise, for she had taken no account of

that day.

IX

GOOD-BYE, CALIFORNIA

On the whole, in spite of “Annie Laurie’s” burdensome velvets, in spite

of Mojave’s sulphur blasts and blistering sands, it had been—or, but for

her mother’s illness, might have been—a happy as well as a profitable

two years. Mimi and Hester Prynne had been worth while. “Wind” had been

an artistic triumph.

Miss Moir, very close to Lillian during all this period, has left a

series of impressions and incidents not directly connected with her

work:

I remember the first time I saw her at the Ambassador Hotel, New

York, she struck me as a person of perfect poise and great charm

of manner in which there was something almost childishly

appealing. In many ways she is a paradox. She gives the impression

of helplessness when she is really the most resourceful person I

know. You think sometimes that she is weak and easily led, and

then you suddenly come up against an inflexible will and an iron

determination to do what she has set her mind on doing.

Then another picture comes into my mind as I often saw her at

parties, sitting uncomfortably in the quietest corner she could

find, talking generally to some elderly person until the time came

to go home, where she always went as soon as possible.

Her hands are expressive of her whole personality, delicately

modelled, yet with a look of latent strength and capability about

them. She uses them beautifully.

She has no fidgety movements. She is one of the few women I know

who have learned the art of perfect stillness.

She loves fortune tellers, though she doesn’t take them seriously

and generally forgets what they have told her, five minutes after

leaving them.

Our entire life in California on looking back, seems to have its

centre in the room where poor Mrs. Gish sat, patient and

speechless, looking forward to the moment when Lillian would get

back from the studio. On her Birthday morning her room was so

crowded with presents it looked like a giftshop. She was delighted

with everything, and seemed to take a turn for the better from

that day. Until then she had seemed to be losing interest in

life—slipping away from us. Having once aroused her from this

lethargy Lillian’s whole endeavor was spent on keeping her mother

amused. She was constantly coming home with some lovely thing for

her—a pretty bed-jacket, a taffeta quilt for her bed, an exquisite

set of china for her breakfast tray.

Mr. Mencken came for dinner one Sunday night. I remember we were

all a little bit worried about entertaining such a distinguished

guest, but we needn’t have been because he seemed to enjoy

everything with the zest of a schoolboy.

I have somewhat different memories of the night Mr. Hergesheimer

came to dine. Dinner was set for 7:30; Mary Pickford and Douglas

Fairbanks arrived, but no Mr. Hergesheimer. Half an hour and then

three-quarters of an hour went by—still he did not appear. Finally

the telephone rang and a desperate voice called over the wire. It

was Mr. Hergesheimer: somehow or other he had gone to the house

which Lillian had rented the previous year, and had been unable

sooner to locate her present abode. He arrived quite out of

breath, an hour late, and considerably disturbed.

One of the pleasantest recollections I have of California is the

evening Lillian and I went to a “bowl” concert just a week or so

before coming East for good. It was a night of brilliant

moonlight, unusually warm for that climate and perfect for a

concert in the open air. I remember as we drove homeward after it

was all over, that we talked of our years together in California,

of all the drama and comedy we had shared there, and agreed that

it hadn’t been such an unpleasant time after all.

Then, presently, they were off for New York; Lillian, her Mother; the

nurse, Miss Davies; Miss Moir; John, the poll-parrot, which they had got

twelve years before at Denishawn; two dogs; three canary-birds, and a

bus-load of hand luggage.

As usual, Lillian had worked up to the last minute, had made one or more

scenes of “The Enemy” the morning of her departure. Little she guessed,

when she walked out of the studio, that those were the last scenes in

silent pictures she would ever make, that all unsuspected, another

beautiful craft was about to be relegated to that limbo of outworn

things which holds the painted panorama and the wood engraving. During

fifteen years, she had been a unique figure in an industry which she had

watched grow, almost from infancy, to a mighty maturity, and which was

now at the moment of dissolution. That Lillian did not see this is not

surprising, but that the great producers, with ears supposedly close to

the ground, their research departments always alert, should have taken

so little account of the warning voices (literally that), is

astonishing.

* * * * *

Of Lillian’s pictures, I believe there are three on which her screen

fame rests. In many there are distinguished scenes: in “The White

Sister,” for instance; in “Romola,” in “Wind,” and in “Way Down East.”

But of those which were consistently good, I should name, in order,

“Broken Blossoms,” “La Bohême” and “The Scarlet Letter” as those for

which she will be longest remembered: and this because of their

exquisite beauty and their suitability to her special gifts.

As to what Lillian did for the picture world, I am troubled by a lack of

knowledge. There are moments when it would seem that very little has

been done for it, by anybody. I suspect, however, that she did more than

now appears. She had a wide following among the picture players, to

whom, through example alone, she must have taught restraint, delicacy—in

a word, good manners. In a hundred pages I could not say more, or wish

to.

X

REINHARDT

Lillian, at the Drake Hotel, in New York was kept busy declining offers

of engagements—ranging from vaudeville through matrimony and pictures to

the so-called legitimate stage. Maurice Maeterlinck wrote to a friend:

I should be all the more happy to undertake the scenario you speak

of, in that it concerns Lillian Gish, who is the great star of the

cinema that, among all, I admire, for no other has so much talent,

or is so natural, so sympathetic, so moving.[3]

Lillian concluded a contract with the United Artists for three pictures,

to be directed by Max Reinhardt, foremost director and producer of

Europe. The company had a contract with Reinhardt, and it was on their

promise that he should direct her, that Lillian signed with them. Her

plan had had its inception a year earlier, she said, during a visit of

Reinhardt’s to Los Angeles.

“My connection with Reinhardt was this: In 1923-24, I had seen his stage

production of ‘The Miracle,’ with Lady Diana Manners and Rosamond

Pinchot. Morris Gest brought it over, and at the time had asked me to

play the part of the nun. Reinhardt, who had seen something of mine—I

suppose ‘The White Sister’—had suggested this. I could not do it because

of my contract. I was then on the eve of returning to Italy, to make

‘Romola.’

“I did not meet Reinhardt until he was in California, with ‘The

Miracle.’ With Rudolph Kommer and Karl von Mueller he came out to our

Santa Monica house, for luncheon. Before luncheon we went to the studio

and ran, I think, ‘Broken Blossoms.’ Then, in the afternoon, ‘La Bohême’

and ‘The Scarlet Letter.’ They seemed to please him. He spoke no

English, and I spoke no German, at the time. Kommer served as

interpreter. It was then that Reinhardt suggested that we might work

together. He had never made a picture, but was eager to try. He had

spent thirty-five years in the theatre, and was tired of it. He had

theatres in Berlin and Vienna, the finest in Europe.”

From Kansas City, Reinhardt and Kommer telegraphed:

Once more we want to thank you for that most fascinating Sunday

you gave us. We greet you as the supreme emotional actress of the

screen and hope fervently that the near future will bring us in

closer contact on the stage and on the screen. Please do not

forget Salzburg when you come to Europe. We shall be waiting for

you.

Salzburg was Reinhardt’s home, where in an ancient castle, Leopoldskron,

he kept open house, for a horde of congenial guests. Reinhardt and

Kommer had spoken of a picture they would prepare when she came to New

York. Now, at the Drake Hotel, they started on a story for it.

Reinhardt, meantime, had brought over a company and was producing

“Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “Danton’s Todt.”

Reinhardt, Lillian said, talked to her about Theresa Neumann, the

peasant miracle girl of Konnersreuth, who on every Friday except feast

days went through the entire sufferings of Christ, the blood trickling

from stigmata on her forehead, her hands and her feet. Nobody but those

who have seen it will believe it, but her case is a very celebrated one,

and has been studied by scientists of Germany and Austria, and of other

countries. Reinhardt believed that a great miracle picture could be

based on the case of Theresa Neumann, and Lillian agreed with him. She

would come to Leopoldskron, and would go to see Theresa Neumann for

herself. “I must do that, of course,” she said, “and familiarize myself

with the lives of the peasantry of which she was one.”

“In April, Mother, Miss Davies and I sailed for Hamburg. We arrived at

Cuxhaven early one morning. Mother had to be carried to the train and to

a private car. Reinhardt was already over there. His secretary met us,

and Mr. Melnitz, head of the United Artists in Germany.

“At Hamburg, we put Mother to bed for two hours. She had been up since

half-past four. Nurse and I had not slept all night. We took train for

Berlin, arriving at six in the evening. I had not realized that Germany

is like America in the matter of news. I supposed we would go in

quietly. Instead, we found the station literally jammed with people, all

trying to get around us. It was terribly hard on poor Mother.”

There were a dozen or two camera-men, and when they found they couldn’t

all take pictures of Lillian, they got around Mrs. Gish, who was in a

big chair carried with poles. She could not tell them that she did not

want her picture taken, and began to cry. When at last they got into an

automobile, all the camera-men and reporters jumped into other cars and

came racing behind, taking pictures all the way to the hotel. During the

next few days, Lillian was too nervous to give more than a few

interviews. Reinhardt comforted her by saying that no artist ever had

come into Germany with such a reception from the press.

At Berlin Lillian consulted Professor Vogt, head of the Kaiser Wilhelm

Institute, supposed to know more than anyone else about cases like her

mother’s. Professor Vogt said he could not do very much for Mrs. Gish,

but warned Lillian that she herself was likely to be headed in the same

direction. He advised that her mother be taken to Doctor Sinn’s

Sanatorium at Neubabelsburg, advice promptly followed. Mrs. Gish

remained there a year.

To Lillian, in Berlin, came this letter:

O smallest blonde:

You must not think of any other place but Leopoldskron! Max

Reinhardt and we all would think that we had failed completely to

please you. Besides, the hotels are now terribly over-crowded and

you would be perfectly miserable there. So please, do overcome any

inhibitions, and come to Leopoldskron! I am expecting your wire

about train and hour.

We are just having Anthony Asquith and Elizabeth Bibesco here.

This means that the whole castle is one flaming song _in gloriam

Lilliane Gish_....

I do hope that Professor Vogt will entirely satisfy the

expectations of your poor mother. My sincerest wishes and regards

to her ... Schloss Kommer and Salzburg are sending you loving

greetings. Au revoir! Yours ever,

R. K. Kommer

“I went to Salzburg,” Lillian said, “to Leopoldskron. Reinhardt and his

secretary, Miss Adler, were on the train, and Kommer was at the station

to meet us. Leopoldskron is a huge place, a little way out of Salzburg,

built hundreds of years ago. I don’t know how many rooms it has, but

only candles were used to light them. I was much impressed when we drove

up to it, and when we got inside. There were ever so many guests,

distinguished persons from everywhere. It is like a great hotel, and has

three dining-rooms. Among the guests, was the poet Hugo von

Hofmannsthal, who had come to work on the story we had planned for our

picture. Kommer got me a maid, Josephine, whom I afterwards brought to

America.

“We worked three weeks on our story, that time; then I went to Paris for

a fortnight, then to Mother at Neubabelsburg. Later I went to

Leopoldskron for another three weeks, to meet Mr. Joe Schenck, who had

come over to hear the story. Frances Marion was in Salzburg by that

time. She said we had a wonderful theme. Schenck also liked it—said we

should get back to Hollywood as quickly as possible, and make it.

Possibly he suspected that something was likely to happen—something like

an earthquake in the picture world. Off there in that corner of Austria,

we never dreamed of it.

“I was anxious to see something of Austrian peasant life at close range.

At Leopoldskron was the artist Feistauer. He himself was a peasant, and

he asked me to pose for him. So we made a bargain. I agreed that if he

and his wife would go with me, I would get a car, pay the expenses of

the trip and he could take us to the part of the country he knew. If he

would do this, I would pose for him. He was quite willing, and we

arranged our party. There were five of us besides the chauffeur:

Feistauer and his wife; von Hofmannsthal’s son Raymond; myself, and

Josephine, my maid.

“It was a wonderful experience. I saw peasant life as I should never

have seen it otherwise. We would stay a day and a night in a peasant

house—huge houses they had, like those in the Schwartzwald, with their

animals in one part of it. Their food was a coarse bread, milk and

potatoes, placed on a kind of framework in the middle of the table. I

was so impressed with it all—different from anything I had ever

seen:—the great room below, the small chambers above. The combined

living-room and kitchen was sometimes very beautiful. The great

cooking-stoves so unlike any I had known. Beautiful, too, because

primitive.

“We came one day to a house where a man walked out to meet us, carrying

a child in his arms, leading another. I thought he had the most

wonderful face I had ever seen, a perfect Christus. He was followed by

some geese, two dogs and a baby lamb. He came up and greeted us with the

word they use with strangers, ‘Christgott,’ and led us to the house. He

apparently knew Feistauer, but his greeting to him was the same as to

us. We sat down for a little; then he took Raymond and myself through

the house. We were there perhaps an hour in all. When he had gone I said

to Feistauer: ‘If you should ever wish to paint the Christus, I should

think you would use that man. He is nearer my idea of the Christ than

anyone I have ever seen.’ Feistauer said: ‘I have done so, often. He is

my brother!’ Because Feistauer had given up the land to be a painter in

town, he was, in a sense, an outcast, a stranger—no more than any other

of our party.

“It was at the end of my second visit to Salzburg that I saw the miracle

girl, Theresa Neumann—at Konnersreuth. I was on the way to see Mother

again, and stopped off there. She was to be the subject of our picture,

and it was very necessary that I see her. No one is allowed to do so

without special permission. I had letters from the Archbishop of

Regensburg. Josephine, my maid, went with me.

“I found poor, the very poorest, accommodations in the peasant village

where Theresa Neumann lived. She is just a peasant girl herself, the

eldest of eleven children, about thirty years old when I was there.

Hundreds try to see her, but only members of the clergy, or those with

special permits, can get near her on the days of the miracle. There is

no charge of any sort, and her people are very poor, helped a little by

the Church.

“It is the most amazing sight in the world. Her ecstasy begins about one

o’clock Friday morning, and lasts until noon. The wounds, which are

closed and black between times, open, and blood flows from them—from

those on her hands and feet, from the spear-wound in her side, and the

thorn-wounds on her forehead. Tears of blood drip from her eyes, run

down her cheeks, and stain her white gown. I was within three feet of

her, and saw all this. I don’t expect anyone to believe these things,

but I saw them, exactly as I have said, and if it is trickery, it is

beyond anything of the sort I have ever heard of. I asked her to pray

for Mother, and I believe she did. Mother got better, so it may have

helped.

“The miracle has been accounted for in many ways, both by skeptics and

believers. The believer, a priest, who talked about it to me, called her

a ‘child of grace,’ which may be as good an explanation as any, if one

knew what it meant. Dozens of books have been written about her. Perhaps

she is all mind, but that seems a poor explanation. It is claimed that

she has not taken food or drink for a number of years. Incredible, of

course, but no more so than the things I _saw_.”

-----

Footnote 3:

“Je serais d’autant plus heureux d’entreprendre le scénario dont vous

m’avez parlé, qu’il s’agit de Lillian Gish, qui est la grande vedette

du cinéma que j’admire entre toutes, car aucune autre n’a autant de

talent, n’est aussi naturelle, aussi sympathique, aussi émouvante.”

XI

THE SHADOW SPEAKS

Lillian left her mother in the sanatorium, where apparently she was

improving, and with Josephine, her maid,—booked as a “fellow artist”

(she was really that, for she would serve as model for Austrian peasant

girls in the picture),—Lillian sailed on the _Île de France_, for New

York. Reinhardt presently followed, with the play itself, which von

Hofmannsthal had completed. Young von Hofmannsthal came as Reinhardt’s

assistant. These two, with Lillian, and Josephine the “fellow artist,”

descended upon Hollywood.

Alas, for the beautiful, silent picture play of “The Miracle Girl of

Konnersreuth.” They were just a year too late!

* * * * *

For now it was that the long-unexpected-inevitable had happened: All in

a brief summer and autumn—in a night, really—a change had come over the

flicker of the photographic dream ... it SPOKE!

The film with a voice—a possibility for twenty years or more—hardly

taken seriously except by the inventors—now, all at once, had arrived.

Rather doubtfully at first—a crude thing, but of instant popularity. The

writer of these pages remembers a fierce summer day in ’28, when he

slipped into a jammed and darkened house on Broadway, and sat on the

floor in a remote corner, fascinated, watching the moving phantoms,

silent heretofore, as they shouted wildly at each other in the _mise en

scène_ of a haunted house. After that, when he heard friends say: “It is

just a novelty—it will not last,” he was not convinced. If he knew

anything at all, he knew better than that. If they could do so much,

they would presently do more. They did. The Warners put out Al Jolson in

“The Singing Fool,” and the doom of the silent film was not only

written, but sounded very loud. The play itself was hardly a classic—it

didn’t need to be. Jolson’s speaking and singing voice was up to

microphone requirements—sound and vision were synchronized. The record

was miles beyond anything attempted before. The “Talkie” had come!

A huge shudder ran through the ranks of movie actors. Many of them did

not even speak English. Many of them did it very badly—provincially,

nasally, flatly, indistinctly, or with an impossible accent. Of those

who spoke it well enough, not all had voices suited to the

microphone—(“Mike,” as they irreverently named it)—they recorded poorly.

Their voices had to be “placed.” Voice culture became a new Hollywood

industry. Some, even, began learning to sing.

* * * * *

It was just at this point, late in 1928, that Lillian and Reinhardt

reached Hollywood. The press heralded their coming, recounted the story

of Reinhardt’s life, and distinguished work; how now with a new and

marvelous story, written by von Hofmannsthal in the great castle of

Leopoldskron, for the “first lady of the screen,” he was ready to enter

and electrify the picture world.

Good publicity, but it fell on deaf ears. Jolson HAD MADE the “Jazz

Singer”! Chaos ruled in the studios. A dozen producers who didn’t know

whether they stood on their heads or their heels, shouted that it was

all just a passing fad, but meantime were knocking together “sound

stages” and engaging people who could talk prettily to “Mike,” or sing,

or do anything that would make a convincing noise.

Of course, everyone still believed in the old silent pictures, but

nobody wanted to start one. Those already begun were dropped. Gloria

Swanson, at great loss, stopped a half-completed film.

Reinhardt and Lillian were dazed. Joe Schenck, who in Salzburg had bid

them hurry home to make their picture, now repudiated it—told them to

make a talkie of it. Reinhardt protested, then went into the desert—not

to fast and pray, but to do what Schenck demanded.

No use. He had been working for a year on a silent picture. Now to make

the shadows speak ... impossible. Even the desert ... even fasting and

prayer ... even “The Miracle Girl,” could not accomplish it. He lingered

through the winter, hoping that those who said the talkie was just a fad

were right. Then....

Lillian sighed as she remembered these sorrowful things:

“Hollywood, always more or less mad, was really an asylum. Even Mary was

doing a talkie, ‘Coquette’[4]; Chester Morris was doing another ‘Alibi.’

Nobody was doing our beautiful old silent pictures, any more. Everywhere

you heard the hammering of workmen building sound stages. Then—with

Spring—Reinhardt returned to his neglected theatres, to his castle at

Salzburg. It had been a great loss to him. I was not responsible, for he

had signed his contract with United Artists before I had, but I felt

terrible over it. He never blamed me, or was anything but fine about it.

I did not see him again until last Summer (1930), when I was in Paris.

We spoke of the pity of it all—his coming at the wrong time, when it was

too late—too late and too early. Another year, and he might have been in

the mood for a talkie. He had really come on a sincere errand. Most of

those who come, come just for the money in it. He had come for a finer

purpose.”

-----

Footnote 4:

Lillian herself was more or less responsible for “Coquette.” In a

letter of Sept. 17, 1928, Mary wrote her: “I remember, dear, you were

the first to tell me to do ‘Coquette.’ If it turns out well, it will

be the second time in my career that you have helped me bridge a

difficult place.” Lillian’s suggestion, however, had been, of course,

for a silent picture.

XII

ON THE FLYING CARPET

Lillian looked out of the window of the den, on the boats passing up and

down, perhaps reflecting a little on the uncertainty of human

undertakings.

“I have one bright memory of that gloomy Spring,” she said presently.

“One morning in March, while Reinhardt was in the desert, Douglas

Fairbanks called me up, and asked:

“‘Are you game to do something?’

“‘What is it?’ I said.

“‘Never mind; are you game to do it?’

“‘Are you and Mary going to do it?’

“‘We are.’

“‘Well, then I will.’

“‘All right. We’re going on a plane to have a look at the war in Mexico.

Will you go?’

“‘I should _think_ so. When do we start?’

“‘Right away, as soon as we can get ready.’

“I went up to Pickfair, to see Mary as to what we were to take. We met

at the studio about eleven o’clock, drove to the Glendale Flying Field,

and got into what seemed a very big, powerful plane. There were ten of

us altogether: Doug and Mary; Doug’s brother, Robert, and his wife,

Lurie; Mary’s niece (‘Little Mary’); two cousins, Verna and Sonny;

myself, and the pilot and captain. There was plenty of room and we got

off without any trouble.

“But it turned out that our motors were not powerful enough. We meant to

cross the mountains by the San Bernardino Pass, but when we were over

the low first range, we ran into a storm of wind and snow, and our

engines would not lift the plane over the Pass. The snow got so thick

that we could not see a thing in any direction—just a white, whirling

mass. We were likely to run into the mountain-side, any moment. We

rolled and billowed around, three times turning back, and trying it

again. Then the captain, very white, came and shouted into Doug’s ear

that it was madness to go on, that we had better turn back and follow

down the Coast to Mexico. It was impossible, the captain said, to find

the Pass.

“We turned back, and all were relieved. There had been no question as to

the danger. Less than a year later, a big plane with a party was lost up

there, dashed against the mountain-side.

“The weather was better as soon as we got away from the mountains, and

along the Coast was fine. At Agua Caliente, Mexico, we ate dinner and

spent the night.

“We telephoned for a larger plane, and a big Wasp came down. All got

into it except Robert Fairbanks, who said he knew when he had had

enough, and that the day before had satisfied him. We left about eleven

o’clock. For some reason, we did not take much along in the way of food,

and about three P. M. our crowd began to look rather poorly—hungry and

seasick. Even Douglas shushed Mary when she started to tell her

troubles. He had a greenish look, and not at all his usual high-hearted

manner.

“We got to Phoenix, Arizona, about five, starved, and went to the

beautiful hotel. They lodged us all in one bungalow, and immediately we

called loudly for tea and sandwiches. We spent the night there, left

around nine, next morning. We flew to Grand Canyon—not really to the

Canyon, but to the nearest flying field, and drove to the Canyon by

motor. There we took a long walk along the rim, and looked down on the

Canyon in the evening light, one of the strangest and loveliest and most

impressive sights in the world—really sublime.

“Next morning, we motored back to the plane and headed Westward. We got

hungry, but there seemed no good place to stop for luncheon. All we

could see were poor little Mexican or Indian villages, in the desert.

Finally, we got to Las Vegas, and after luncheon flew homeward, over the

mountains we had been unable to cross when we started, dropping down

into the San Fernando Valley at sunset, as on a magical flying carpet.

We had had four beautiful days. We did not see much of the war, though

at one place in Mexico we saw smoke, and thought we heard the sound of

distant firing. Douglas had believed it unwise to go any nearer. We

might be taken for spies, and pursued—even brought down. After all, war

was not what we really cared to see.”

XIII

“ONE ROMANTIC NIGHT”

It is difficult to realize the size of the catastrophe resulting from

the sudden production of talking pictures, even of pictures with “sound

effects,” as many of them were, at first. Some of them really

talked—better, or worse, than others. No matter; every picture theatre

in New York, and most of them on the road, were presently being “wired

for sound.” All the millions (possibly billions) of dollars’ worth of

silent pictures, shrunk in value at a ghastly rate. The Eastern

Hemisphere, the only market for them presently, was comparatively

unimportant. Hundreds of pictures were useless; picture players found

themselves “out of a job.” Stars began to pale and disappear.

On the other hand, ill as was the wind, it dispensed benefits. Stage

players out of employment found market for their trained speech. Their

feet warmed the way to Hollywood. A good many were already there. As the

months passed, the screen showed more of the old familiar faces.

Broadway to the rescue. Even the great succumbed. George Arliss, master

of diction, joined the procession, Ruth Chatterton—eventually, Lillian.

Not willingly. She still believed in the silent film. She had objected

even to the lip movement, the simulated speech insisted upon by the

directors. To her, the perfect picture must be pure pantomime—with

music—appropriate music, as in “Broken Blossoms.” It would never be

that, now. Beautiful Evelyn Hope was dead. There is no help for such

things. Tears, idle tears. Since the beginning of time, grief has never

repaired a single loss. One might as profitably wail over the sunken

Atlantis.

She still had her contract with the United Artists, and by its terms

must make at least one picture before she could cancel it. She had hoped

to get out of it altogether; but while it did not mention talking

pictures, she was advised to abide by the terms.

“It would involve me in a suit with the United Artists, and I had had

suits enough. As it was, I barely avoided another: The company had

agreed to let me do Eugene O’Neill’s ‘Strange Interlude,’ if I could get

it for a reasonable sum—I could have it to take the place of the

Reinhardt picture. I came East in April (1929), to see Mr. Madden,

O’Neill’s agent. I could have it for $75,000. This suited Mr. Joe

Schenck. It suited Mr. O’Neill. We had the papers drawn up. I was to

sign them that morning, and it was only because I was protected by an

angel that I didn’t do it. On that very day, a woman brought suit

against O’Neill, for plagiarism. Had I signed that contract, I should

have been involved in the suit. She was beaten, and had to pay costs,

but the damage to O’Neill was more than that, in fees.

“Meantime, Dorothy had gone to Germany and brought Mother to London.

Mother was tired of sanatoriums and hotels. She wanted a home, and I

decided to have one. I joined them, and Dorothy and I went to Paris, to

collect furniture for an apartment. I had most of it made, copies of old

French pieces.

“I came home in August, and all through that month looked for a place to

live. It was a terrible search in the heat. When I saw this apartment,

with its outlook on the river, its quiet air and sunshine, I knew that

it was what we wanted.

“My friend, Mr. Paul Chalfin, kindly looked after the decoration, and I

started at once for California, to do the picture we had selected, ‘The

Swan.’ This was during the latter part of September, 1929. The apartment

would not be ready before November.”

In California, Lillian lived with Madame de Grésac, at Beverly Hills.

There was just then a good deal of talk about kidnapping, and she was

advised against living alone. Josephine, her Austrian maid, had remained

in Los Angeles, but met her at the station, with flowers and tears.

Careful preparation for “The Swan” began. Lillian was admirably suited

to the rôle, that of the fair Princess Alexandra, her voice quality and

diction needed only slight adjustment. Melville Baker had written the

script for “The Swan,” adapting it from his translation of the original

play by Ferenc Molnar. She thought very well of it, and hoped for the

best.

She wrote Reinhardt of her decision, and received a gracious reply. Both

artistically and from the business point of view, it (“The Swan”) ought

to be a success, he said, and added:

In spite of all those rather disagreeable experiences I had to go

through in Hollywood, I have kept the time I spent there in most

agreeable remembrance. To have been together with you, your

undeviable artistic spirit, blossoming there like a rare lonely

flower, and the pureness of your conviction, made me happy and

will remain for me an unlosable experience for all time to

come....

Making a picture now was a different matter from those very recent old

days. Then, a set where action was in progress, was about the noisiest

place on the lot. Stagehands and various bosses shouting to one another,

the director shouting at the players—noise, noise, no end to it. Now,

all was silence. Every sound, even the feeblest rustling, was recorded

by the microphone. Except for the actors, their laughter, their

breathing, the accessory beat of rain, or hail, the stillness was

perfect. The sound stage was a padded cell.

[Illustration: “THE FIRST LADY OF THE SCREEN”]

“With the preparation and all,” Lillian said, “I worked about three

months on ‘One Romantic Night,’ as they called the picture later. Mary

Pickford has a bungalow on the lot, and lent it to me. I used it as a

dressing-room, sometimes I slept there, when I had to be on the lot very

early. I had Georgie, my dog, and Josephine. It would have been well

enough, but they were building soundstages all about, which made a great

deal of noise, all night long. It was a complete little house. Josephine

cooked for me when we stayed there.

“I arrived in New York Christmas morning, with a wild turkey, which I

got in Arizona. It had been brought to the train by some friends of a

little girl who had done my hair out there. They had often sent turkeys

to me, to California. It was all dressed, and all the way across the

continent, cooks on the diners kept it in their refrigerators. They were

very much interested.

“We had dinner in our new apartment, our first real home. Mother was

delighted with it, and has seemed better and more contented ever since.

Her pleasure in it makes us all so happy.”

“One Romantic Night” was a photographically beautiful picture, with a

distinguished cast. Lillian, as Princess Alexandra; Rod La Roque, as the

Prince (sent, against his will, to woo her); Marie Dressler, as her

designing mother; Conrad Nagel, as a tutor, in love with Alexandra; O.

P. Heggie—altogether a fine company.

Yet it has been called a poor picture, and Lillian today is not proud of

her part in it. It was by no means a failure. Never had she looked more

lovely. No longer a victim of tyranny, brutality and betrayal, but a

Princess, as rare as any out of a fairy tale, with a palace and a rose

garden and suitors, with a lilting, perfectly-timed voice, Lillian

appeared to have come into her own. Her acting and beauty furnished no

surprise, but her voice and laugh did; she had been silent, and sad, so

many years. The audience followed her through a presentation, in itself

seldom more than mildly exciting, and not always that. The tutor’s

astronomy at times wearied, not only the Prince, but, unhappily, the

audience. Marie Dressler’s broad comedy was highly amusing, but there

were moments when one got the impression that the play was not only very

light comedy, as apparently it was meant to be, but a good farce gone

wrong.

Only, that fairy princess in the rose garden—on a terrace under the

stars, or leaning from a balcony to her Prince, was not quite farce

material. And the ending helped: the Prince and Princess, in a properly

ordered elopement, in quite a royal car, swinging under the castle

walls, out of the picture, into the night, to the notes of a marvelously

musical klaxon, added a touch that brought the story back to the realm

of pure romance, leaving a lovely impression.

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

PART FOUR

I

“UNCLE VANYA”

It was at the end of May, 1930, at the Rivoli Theatre, New York City,

that Lillian was presented in her first, probably her only, talking

picture. For during those months since she had finished it, something

had happened—something of epochal proportions: she had _returned to the

stage_! A block down Broadway, in 48th Street, at the Cort Theatre,

since April 15, she had been appearing six nights and two afternoons a

week, as Helena, in Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya.”

It had all come about naturally enough. When it became known that

Lillian Gish was closing her contract with the United Artists, proposals

arrived plentifully. The distinguished Russian manager, director,

author, Dantchenko, wrote that he had begun a story with her especially

in mind; Basil Rathbone sent a manuscript and wrote: “I need not say how

happy I should be to do a play with you, a privilege denied me even in

my very own play, ‘The Swan.’” A cable from Germany stated that a motion

picture company had been formed of those who believed in Reinhardt, and

that Jannings and all the best of Germany’s artists had signed; that the

first picture was to be “La Vie Parisienne,” by Offenbach—three versions

to be made, French, English and German, Lillian to have the position of

production manager.

But then came an opportunity such as she had hoped for: One day, George

Jean Nathan spoke to her of the actress Ruth Gordon, of how much Lillian

would like her.

“Couldn’t you arrange a meeting?” she asked.

He could, and did. He asked them both to tea, at the Colony Restaurant.

Lillian was not disappointed in Ruth Gordon. They had one love in

common: France. They talked a great deal about that pleasant land, its

beauties, its castles, its wines—especially its wines—one of which in

particular, they both loved, Clos Veugeot. Ruth Gordon said:

“And I know a man who has the same taste: Jed Harris, the theatrical

producer.”

Someone proposed: “We must try to get a bottle. The first one of us who

finds it, to give a dinner, and invite Mr. Harris.”

Said Lillian, remembering:

“But of course no one could get a bottle of Clos Veugeot, any more. One

day, Ruth telephoned that she had a bottle of Rhine wine, and that Mr.

Harris loved that, too. So we had a small dinner in her apartment, with

Rhine wine and strawberry ice-cream. For the first time, I heard Jed

Harris talk. I thought I had never heard anyone like him. It seemed to

me that he knew the theatre as no one I had ever met. Later, when I went

with Ruth to get my hat, I said: ‘Ruth, he’s wonderful! I’d work for

such a man for nothing.’ Ruth agreed. She had worked for him in ‘Serena

Blandish,’ and told me how fine he had been.

“A few weeks later, George Nathan called up to say that Jed Harris had a

part for me: ‘That’s splendid,’ I said, ‘but do you think I could do

it?’

“‘Of course. It’s Helena, in Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya.”’

“I said I would read it over at once, and see if I could do it. I adored

Chekhov, and had a volume of his plays, but it didn’t contain ‘Vanya.’ I

was very excited. For ten years—from the time of working with Victor

Maurel, I had hoped to get back to the stage.”

She ran out to a bookshop, and presently was back, deep in the play. She

thought Helena a hard part—wondered if she could do it. Her stage work

lay far behind her—really counted for little, though for more, perhaps,

than she realized.

This was at the end of February, or early in March. Almost immediately,

they went into rehearsal. Jed Harris had selected a well-nigh perfect

cast. With Walter Connolly in the title rôle, the tired, tearful,

disillusioned Vanya; with Osgood Perkins, as Astroff, the hard-riding,

hard-drinking, disillusioned doctor; with Eugene Powers, as Serebrakoff,

the ailing, fat-headed, city professor; with Lillian, as Helena, his

young, beautiful, disillusioned wife; with Joanna Roos, as Sonia, his

unhappy, love-lorn daughter; with Kate Mayhew, as Nurse Marina; with

Isabel Irving, Eduardo Ciannelli, and Harold Johnsrud—one must travel

far to find a group of players better suited to a Chekhov play, or one

more congenial to work with. Ruth Gordon was not in the cast, but she

came to Lillian’s apartment and worked with her. So did Mr. Harris. They

believed in her, and encouraged her to believe in herself.

Going back to the stage had its difficulties. For one thing, it had been

seventeen years since she had appeared before an audience, and then had

never played a leading part. The audience did not matter so much—she had

never been audience conscious. But the rehearsing. In the pictures, the

scene was shot, the film developed, and put on the screen for judgment,

all within a brief time. If unsatisfactory, it could be made over, and

over again. Furthermore, it could be “edited.” Now, it was all quite

different. You could not see how well, or how badly, you had done a

thing; you only knew what the director told you.

She had moments of misgiving. Perhaps it would have been better,

certainly safer, to remain in the pictures—even the talking pictures

that had offended her as incongruous. They were new, crude—Arliss in his

“Disraeli” had taken a long step towards something that, in the end,

might mean, if not perfection, at least something as near it as the

silent film had reached. Oh, well....

* * * * *

It was in New Haven, on the evening of April 6 (1930), that the curtain

went up on Lillian’s first night in “Uncle Vanya.” She was nervous,

after all. The moment came when Helena enters, merely to drift

voicelessly across the stage. There was a burst of applause from the

audience—she was not prepared for that, and was almost as frightened as

on that long-ago night of the explosion at Risingsun. She quickened her

step, quickened it still more—was almost running, at the exit. Jed

Harris still gives amusing imitations of this first entrance across the

threshold of her new-old career.

Never mind—it was a success. The leading New Haven paper, which never

before had given an editorial to a theatrical performance, gave one next

morning, to “Vanya.” Professor William Lyon Phelps invited her to

luncheon, and was full of enthusiasm. He had seen nothing, he declared,

since Mary Anderson, to impress him so much as Lillian’s Helena. He

wrote a letter to the “People’s Forum,” calling the public’s attention

to the play.

All very gratifying: To Lillian, however, one of the most satisfactory

features of her new venture was the absence of the money element—always,

after the Griffith days, a foremost consideration. The word “salary” had

never been mentioned between her and Mr. Harris. She did not even know

what she was to have until she got her envelope at the end of the week.

* * * * *

It was a gray afternoon, in the little den which has become so much a

part of our story, that Lillian recounted these things. She owed a heavy

debt to Ruth Gordon, she insisted, and thought of Helena as “Ruth’s

child.”

And just here came one of those coincidences which are always being

popped into plays and stories. In another room, the telephone rang. A

maid appeared at the door.

“Will you speak to Miss Gordon?” she said.

II

HELENA IN NEW YORK

The New Haven Register, after commenting on the “superb piece of staging

done by Jed Harris, and the quite indescribable beauty and magic of

Lillian Gish’s performance as Helena,” spoke of “Uncle Vanya” as “surely

one of the few really great plays in existence ... a richly polyphonic

drama, in which one watches the drift and flow of human life as one

listens to the different voices in a Bach fugue.”

True enough, though “Uncle Vanya” is hardly a play at all, but a

succession of incidents with no more plot than a picture, which is

precisely what it is—a tapestry of exquisite workmanship, a cartoon of

human futility—in this case, on a Russian farm.

Mark Twain once wrote:

“God, who could have made every one of His children happy ... yet never

made a single happy one.”

Chekhov might have taken that as a text for any of his plays. In

“Vanya,” no one of the characters is even passably happy, except Marina,

the nurse, and Marina’s happiness lies in strong tea and hope in the

hereafter. All the rest are actively _un_happy, especially Vanya

himself, who is hopelessly in love with Helena, wife of a querulous

egotist twice her age—Helena being a little in love with “the Doctor,”

who is drinking too much, himself heedless of the love of Sonia, who is

too good for him, and breaking her heart for him, and is about the

unhappiest of all. The late R. K. Munkittrick, of Puck, had a poem

beginning: “All the house is full of sorrow, all the house is full of

gloom”; the rest of it will not bear quotation, but in its entirety, it

would make a typical Chekhovian chant. Chekhov’s houses all were full of

sorrow—the pathetic gloom of thwarted human ambitions and desires, of

blasted human ideals. Like any of us who happens to think about it,

Chekhov did not at all know whether life was a tragedy or a comedy, so

he called his plays comedies, and laughed them off on us, letting the

tragedy take care of itself, and sink in, and add itself to our own, to

make certain that we had our share. And in doing this, he created

pictures of which, as the Register remarked, “one is forever thinking:

‘These things cannot have been written, they must have been lived.’”

With the possible exception of “The Cherry Orchard,” “Uncle Vanya” is, I

should think, the choicest of Chekhov’s tapestries, and the part of

Helena, the subtlest example of his artistry.

Certainly, no rôle could have been better suited to Lillian. Helena’s

beauty, her elusive, eerie personality, her mild, impersonal attitude

toward much of what went on about her—it was as if the part had been

created for her, or she for the part. It is the advent of Helena, and

her gouty, insufferable husband, Serebrakoff, that is the catastrophe of

the play—a calamity, in Astroff’s phrase, as definite as the ruin

wrought by a herd of elephants—and misses being complete only because

Vanya’s attempt to shoot Serebrakoff hurries them away. There is no

special reason why sympathy should be with Helena, except that she is

beautiful, and indifferent, and only passively to blame for the trouble

she causes, and for the fact that she is bound for life to the

bewhiskered Serebrakoff. Perhaps that is enough; perhaps the fact that

Lillian played the part had something to do with it. The scene between

the two, which opens the second act, is one of the high spots in the

play. The contrast between Lillian in a canary-colored dressing-gown,

her splendid hair loose, and her trumpery husband, reveals an entire

epic, as tragical as any in the human story; and wherever the blame may

lie interests the audience not at all, the chief desire being that the

whining old human disaster may pass away as promptly as

possible—overnight—leaving the lovely Helena and the doctor, or

somebody, to live happy ever after.

* * * * *

It was at the Cort Theatre, on the evening of April 15, that “Uncle

Vanya” opened in New York City.

It was the event of the Spring season. A first-night audience in New

York is a different matter from one in New Haven. New Haven being a

university town, a Chekhov first-night audience would be largely

intellectual, with a good sprinkling of picture fans who had “adored

Lillian on the screen.” In New York, there would be all the typical

first-nighters, who get a thrill out of any first night, and especially

where it is the first appearance of a comely lady, famous in a

different, even if kindred, field. Also, there would be the

professionals of stage and screen, each with a very special interest;

and all the Chekhovians, some of them doubtful and critical, resolved

not to be carried off their feet by any trick of beauty and spotlight,

but to stand firm for art only; after these, an army of fans, who all

the years had longed to see Lillian perform in the flesh, and, of

course, there would be intellectuals, too—and critics—on the whole, I

submit, except for the fans, a rather hard-boiled audience, one

calculated to put fear into the troubled heart....

But then the curtain went up ... on a Russian garden scene, and

presently, across the stage, floated a vision of loveliness, and all the

fans broke loose. And all the Chekhovians, and first-nighters, and

professionals, and critics of high and low degree, forgot they were

hard-boiled, and broke loose, too, and pounded their hands together long

after the vision had passed, as if they hoped it might return, if only

to bow.

The _Times_ next morning spoke of “the storminess of the greeting at her

entrance,” and Charles Darnton, in his afternoon column, had this to say

of it, and of the play as a whole:

The applause that greeted her at her appearance not only followed

her every step of the way but into the wings. Even then it kept up

warmly, strongly, insistently. For a moment I was seized with the

sickening fear she might pop into view again, like a grand opera

singer after an aria, to bow to the tribute. Evidently, the

audience expected no less of her. But it might just as well have

expected to call back the Ghost in “Hamlet.”

The event had its peculiar phase. Walter Connolly was playing the

principal character, and playing it finely, whereas Lillian Gish

was appearing in a minor rôle, or what would have been a minor

rôle in the hands of an ordinary actress. Yet throughout the whole

performance interest centered in Miss Gish.

This is said with every consideration for Mr. Connolly. He could

not help himself. He was as powerless, and blameless, in the

matter as though he had been playing with Duse. But I couldn’t

help wondering how he felt about it. Not that I suspected him of

professional jealousy. It was just that the gods, or Jed Harris,

had set down an artist touched by genius, and there was nothing to

be done about it. When Miss Gish again appeared, this time to stay

and let us hear as well as see her, when the presence of her

filled the stage like light flooding through a window into a room,

she was so luminous that the others, including Mr. Connolly, faded

into the background. Never before had I seen quite the same thing

done in quite the same way.

Certainly, she is not a pushing person. Instead of crowding into

the limelight, she seems always to be withdrawing from it. Yet

wherever she goes her own radiance follows her and lights her up.

Try as you may, you cannot get her out of your eye. Just what this

rare thing is I hesitate to say. But a first-nighter did say to

me, “She is sublime.”

Whatever it may be, it is there in the eyes, the face, the hair,

the voice, the form of Lillian Gish.

True enough, but it was a qualification that in future would make it

difficult for her to get a part in any play having more than one major

rôle.

Mr. Darnton says that he was assured by Mr. Harris that bringing Lillian

Gish back to the stage was the finest thing he had been able to do in

the theatre, adding: “I am convinced that her performance is one of the

most magnificent things I have ever seen.”

If there was any dissenting voice as to Lillian’s triumph, I have been

unable to discover it. But I think there was none. She had everything

demanded by the part: the personality, the subtle understanding, the

years of training which had equipped her for its perfect interpretation.

Percy Hammond, of the _Herald Tribune_, wrote:

“In future when I am told that association with the films is a

destructive influence, I shall cite Miss Gish’s appearance in ‘Uncle

Vanya’ to prove the contention wrong.”

III

“THE PENALTY OF GREATNESS”

We have reached the point in this narrative where the writer’s personal

association with Miss Gish began. Though long an ardent admirer of her

work on the screen I had never seen her, never made any attempt to do

so. Once, from France I had written urging her to make a picture of Joan

of Arc. I know now that this was an old story to her; many had offered

the same suggestion—the idea had been one of her own dreams.

Engagements, one thing after another, had always interfered. I treasured

the two friendly letters she wrote me about it, but the matter had gone

no further. Now, three years later, back in America, the papers told me

that Lillian Gish was appearing in person and in picture, in Broadway

productions. “Vanya” was playing to capacity, and I do not like buying

seats in advance—something is so liable to happen.

Then, one June day, I found myself on Broadway in front of the Rivoli,

facing the announcement: LILLIAN GISH IN ONE ROMANTIC NIGHT. I learned

that it was continuous, and that there were seats. A very little later,

in the cool dimness, I sat watching Alexandra and Prince Albert and the

others, and for the first time was hearing Lillian speak.

I thought her more pleasing than ever, and her clear, perfectly

enunciated speech was a revelation. I had feared that it might be too

loud, too low, provincial—in some way disappointing. It was none of

these things; it was pure and sweet, and particularly intelligible; the

microphone had recorded every syllable. I sat twice through the picture,

suffering through several program features until it came again.

Once more outside, I was sorry I had not remained longer, for the sun

was a hot glare. Sitting in Fairyland with Lillian was much more to my

taste. I drifted down Broadway, and by chance (apparently), turned into

48th Street.

All at once I stopped: From a large frame on an easel, several Lillians

looked out at me. A moment later, I realized that it was Wednesday, for

a card at the top plainly stated MATINÉE TO-DAY. I was at the entrance

to the Cort Theatre. Some people were going in. I wondered if I could

get a seat. Midweek, mid-June, and a hot day—I would try.

A very little later, from a fairly good, even if fairly warm, angle, I

watched the curtain go up on a Russian garden, where Kate Mayhew was

pouring tea and Osgood Perkins, in semi-Russian dress—that is to say,

tall boots—was marching up and down.

“Take a little tea, my son.”

And so the action starts, and presently Walter Connolly comes yawning

in, the weariest, most lethargic, ill-kempt man the stage has shown this

season. What a contrast it all is to the smart soigné picture around the

corner! Voices outside, and Gene Powers, wearing long whiskers,

enters.... Then—a beam of pure light, a radiance—floats, glides, drifts

across the stage, to a long, and prolonged, salvo of applause ... and

then ... it is not Kate Mayhew and Perkins any more, or Walter Connolly

and sweet Joanna Roos, but Marina and Astroff and Uncle Vanya and Sonia,

figures in a sad, amusing dream—a dream that is real—truth reflected as

in a looking-glass, and one no longer minds the heat, or thinks of it,

or of anything except the figures that drift in and out, and carry on

the dream ... especially the one figure, embodiment of the Chekhov

spirit—that luminous being around which all the others revolve and

bruise their wings. The lines of Astroff: “What does she think ... who

is she ... what is inside her small blonde head? She drifts about here,

mysterious, fascinating us.... She is like a firefly, that arrests our

attention, but gives no warmth, nothing....” And by and by ... hours,

days, maybe—time no longer counts—the futile human dream draws to its

futile human ending, and Sonia’s sweet voice is saying—to Uncle Vanya,

bowed and heartbroken, like herself:

“You have never known what happiness was ... but wait, Uncle Vanya,

wait. We shall rest. Beyond the grave we shall say that we have suffered

and wept, and God will have pity on us. And we shall be happy.... The

wheat fields will be there, and the blue cornflowers ... and the woods

in Spring.” And to the low music of Telegin’s guitar, she adds: “And

those who in this existence did not love us ... they’ll love us ...

they’ll want us ... we shall rest.”

The crowd flows out into the June sunshine, the dream with it ... and

all the way home. Poor Uncle Vanya and Sonia ... one would like to

comfort them ... and, yes, poor Helena...!

This was on Wednesday, as I have said. I think it was on Sunday that I

sent a note to Miss Gish, proposing to write of her. I had given up such

work as too arduous, but it seemed to me that this might be a happy

thing to do—the story of one who had begun humbly, and walked in beauty

and humility to achievement, making the world better and lovelier for

her coming.

I suppose it was a week later that I received a characteristically

simple reply. She expressed willingness to cooperate in the proposed

work, modestly adding: “—if I really deserve it. Whatever I could do in

the way of help, I should do most conscientiously.”

One could rely upon that. Whatever she did was done in that way. She was

on the eve of sailing for France, to visit Eugene O’Neill and his wife.

She would return the last of August; then we could begin.

* * * * *

She returned as planned, but it was not until September 11, at her town

home, Beekman Terrace, at the extreme end of 51st Street, New York City,

that we had our first meeting. Arriving, I was shown into the

living-room, a handsome apartment, one end lined with books. A few

moments early, I stood looking out at the striking East River view, when

she entered.

I had, of course, expected to see a beautiful woman—the woman I had

known in the pictures, and on the stage. Yet when she appeared in the

room—a slender figure, simply gowned in black, simply coiffed, without

make-up—and stood in the drench of light reflected from the river, I

confess I caught my breath a little.

I could not understand it. The actress in her home is so often

disappointing. Her beauty is the beauty of her rôle—of her lines, her

make-up, of the lights—she lays it aside with her part—leaves it in the

dressing-room.

Yet it was all simple enough, later: Lillian Gish had never played the

part of a character as lovely as herself ... as her own spirit.

She led the way to the little room overlooking the river, the den with

which we have become familiar—also a place of books. No word of an

agreement, much less of a contract, was mentioned between us. In my

letter I had suggested that the work be done without the idea of gain.

If profit accrued it could be shared. I think neither of us remembered

this—then, or afterwards.

I thought the speaking quality of her voice even more musical than when

I had heard it in the play and the picture. When I mentioned this, she

spoke of the training she had received from Maurel. What I found still

more notable was her refinement of diction. Of Middle-West birth and

early association, it seemed to me remarkable that she had been able to

eliminate practically every trace of sectional usage—no easy matter,

once it is ingrained. I noticed that she pronounced “been” rather in the

English way, though not conspicuously so. It seemed to me that this

woman, whose childhood and girlhood had largely been spent amid

surroundings where purity of diction was indifferently regarded, spoke

about the most satisfactory English I had ever heard.

I mentioned “Vanya”—her utter identification with the part of Helena;

and I asked:

“When one has played many parts, is one ever uncertain as to one’s own

personality?”

“N-no. The actor has a picture in his mind that he hopes to paint on the

screen or present to the audience. I think he does not confuse it with

his own personality. Of course, I speak only for myself.” And a little

later: “I have always honestly tried to reach a high spot—perfection.

Sometimes I seem—almost—to reach it. But then it was never a personal

thing—a mood—a moment in the play.... Acting in itself is not an art—it

is merely repeating lines and gestures, more or less in the manner of

the director. But to give these things a special quality—to make them

produce a particular mood in the mind of the hearer—to stir something

deep down in the heart of the audience—something not measurable by any

physical law—something fourth-dimensional—that is art, and may become a

very great and sublime one.”

I think it was not altogether what she was saying; I think it was as

much her manner, her look ... her voice; but as I listened, the feeling

grew upon me that she was not quite of the familiar world ... I saw what

Cabell had meant, and Hergesheimer.

“With your voice,” I said, “now that the pictures speak——”

Gently she dissented.

“I do not care for the talking pictures. They seem to me incongruous.

Even the lip movements, to give the effect of speech, seemed to me all

wrong. The silent film at its best was a beautiful thing, and lovely

effects could be produced with it. To make the pictures speak seems to

me a mistake. Oh, I’m sorry I made the ‘Romantic Night.’

“Charlie Chaplin’s picture,” she went on—“I want it to be a success. He

is one of the few who can do what he likes. Mary can do that, too, and

Douglas. None of the rest of us. Yes, the people want the talking

pictures now, but maybe there will be a change. There should be music,

of course. The pictures need music.

“Griffith, in his way, is an artist—too much of an artist ever to be

rich. He has shown the others the way to fortune—he has not travelled it

himself. Nothing satisfied him but the best—completeness. He did not

regard cost. Sometimes in the cause of completeness, he overdid. In

‘Intolerance,’ for example.

“Yes, I have written, from time to time, about the pictures. Not long

ago I did an article for Oliver Sayler’s book, ‘Revolt in the Arts,’ and

I did one on ‘Motion Pictures,’ for the Encyclopaedia Britannica. They

sent me a check, which I have kept as a souvenir. It was for twenty-one

dollars.”

She told me some of the happenings of her childhood, half pathetic,

amusing things, over which one hardly knew whether to laugh or weep. I

was not surprised to find that she had a happy, delicate sense of

humor—I have yet to meet anyone worthwhile without it.

She spoke of Mark Twain—of her love for his work, especially

“Huckleberry Finn.” Later, of “Mickey Mouse”: “I could see an entire

show of nothing else.”

She spoke of her mother, her early hardships, her final break. “All

those years of struggle and privation had to be paid for; her capital of

health and strength were exhausted, utterly.”

Her face, in the fading light, reflected from the river, took on an

added unreality.

“This is my favorite part of the day,” she said, and it came to me that

her remark, and the manner of it, removed her a step farther from her

surroundings: that she was, in fact, of Arcady.

IV

WORKING WITH LILLIAN

“Uncle Vanya” was to reopen in New York for two weeks at the Booth

Theatre, then it was going on the road—to Boston, to Chicago, to

Pittsburgh, to Philadelphia. There would be rehearsals, but we should

have a good deal of time to work, she said, and would I like to come

again tomorrow? It would be nearly four weeks until she left for Boston.

We could make a good start.

We worked the next day, and the next, and were to have worked on Sunday,

but she was ill when I arrived, and I saw her only briefly, her face

flushed with fever, a light attack of “grippe.” On that day, I first met

that rare woman, her mother, sweet and patient, her face like a

miniature, her hands the daintiest in the world. And then, a few days

later, that princess of comediennes, light-hearted Dorothy, “a bright

flag flying in the breeze,” to whom all the days are good days, all

music good music, to whom all clouds are lined with silver and spanned

with rainbows. The likeness between the sisters, whatever it had been

earlier, was hardly more now than a family suggestion that flashed

faintly at long intervals. They were, in fact, about as different as it

is possible for sisters to be.

Daily we rebuilt the sequence of the years—for Lillian a new occupation

which she entered into with zest. As I have told earlier her “den” had a

wide window that overlooked the East River—a cozy room, with small low

chairs which she loved—a proper setting for her. We almost always worked

there. It is associated with these pages.

Her memory of earlier happenings was vague. We relied a good deal upon

Dorothy, always in childhood with her mother, who had kept her memories

refreshed. To Lillian, those days of wandering had been one like

another—little to look forward to, less to look back upon—mere links in

a succession of one-night stands. Memory and anticipation do not prosper

on that nourishment.

She typified the present. The moment it became the past, it was

blurred—sometimes obliterated. Her interest in tomorrow lay chiefly in

the fact that directly it was to become today. She examined it, she took

it to pieces, in order that she might more substantially rebuild it.

Dreams of a radiant, far-off possibility, interested her but meagerly.

She had grown up without them, or had grown out of the habit of them and

did not miss them any more. I think of her today as a slender figure,

walking through a field of ripening grain, that parts before her, and

closes behind her as she passes along. Her interest in life lies in the

beautiful, exquisite things not far away, and in the welfare of those

about her. She moves steadily forward, her feet firmly set. She is

without envy, or malice, and totally without curiosity. She is, as I

have suggested, apt to forget, but it is never safe to count on her

doing so: More than once I have known her to treasure up some casual,

inconsidered remark, and recall it one day to my undoing.

She was always in quiet good humor, but almost never gay. The spirit of

banter, so riot in Dorothy, was in Lillian altogether lacking. I

remember Dorothy saying to me: “Couldn’t you find a cigarette holder

more complicated than that one?” A remark as foreign to Lillian as toe

dancing.

Yet her words not infrequently took a quaint turn. Speaking of the many

demands for money that came to her, she once said:

“Three hundred dollars is the amount they usually want to borrow.

Sometimes they pay it back—a little of it—when it is three hundred. When

it is five hundred, it is a gift—they don’t pay any of it.”

And I recall her saying: “Jazz is America’s challenge to the world.” And

again: “The Guild Theatre looks like a library gone wrong.” She

certainly made no effort to say such things, and when she did,

apparently did not notice them at all, and would not have remembered

them a moment afterward. But they were often quite unexpectedly on her

tongue.

A mystic herself, she believed in mystical things—in telepathy, in

foreknowledge, in visions, in Christian healing. I have already spoken

of her visit to the Miracle Girl of Konnersreuth, and there was a time,

chiefly on her mother’s account, when she devoted herself to Christian

Science,—mind healing, and the like. I was sure she believed in the

efficacy of prayer, though perhaps could not give any clear reason for

it, beyond the general theory that spiritual and physical harmony might

thus be restored. Certainly she was not orthodox, and I was by no means

sure that she was not a pagan—a Sun-, a tree-, a flower-worshipper—that

would be natural, and proper, for a dryad.

“What is your idea of God?” I asked, one day.

“Force, creative power.” A moment later, she added: “The cloud, the

sunlight, that out there, the beggar on the street, myself—all a part of

the great Whole—the Truth Absolute.”

“Mathematics,” I said, “is the only truth—mathematics in the larger

sense, which includes art, music, science——”

But the faith of her childhood was not to be limited to equations. At

luncheon, one day, we discussed the beauty of certain phrases,

especially those of the King James version of the Bible. She mentioned

the comfort and sheer loveliness of the words: “And underneath are the

everlasting arms.”

I agreed, but pessimistically added:

“The ghastly thing about it is, that they’re not there—that this tiny

pellet of a world is a part of no protecting consciousness—is drifting

unheeded through space.”

“But it holds to its orbit—keeps its place in the constellation.

Something sustains it.”

“A law—gravity, perhaps. Nothing that cares.”

“Oh, but there is—the arms are there—I am certain of it.”

She was interested in dreams. “I have dreamed things that happened;

sometimes soon after,” she once said, and added: “I have worked out

scenes in my sleep, and half-sleep, when my subconsciousness had full

control. And I have many times experienced something that I am sure I

had experienced before—possibly in a dream.”

“Science has accounted for that, rather prosaically, I believe.”

“Science is always accounting for things, and then by and by, it

accounts for them again, in another way.”

One day, when I was rather down, she said to me:

“I know all about how futile one’s work can seem—how inconsequential. So

many times last Spring I thought: ‘What am I doing this for? Dressing up

and pretending to be something I am not—selling myself to these people.

‘Vanya’ was a beautiful play, and I loved it ... but to do it publicly.

It was just offering oneself to be seen, for money. I never had quite

that feeling, doing the pictures. The audience was not present; we were

doing the picture primarily for ourselves—at least it seemed so—making a

panoramic painting, on a screen.”

One day I made use of the word “dooryard.” Surprisingly, I found it new

to her, but she liked the sound—the picture it conveyed. “When lilacs

last in the dooryard bloomed,” I quoted from Whitman. She thought it a

beautiful phrase.

* * * * *

In the article she had written for Oliver Sayler’s book, I read—as

already she had said to me:

I do not believe in the sound film. Something very right, very

true, very precious, was cut short on the verge of its ultimate

and certain perfection by the intrusion of spoken dialogue and by

the consequent throw-back of the cinema toward the theatre. The

silent film was slowly coming into its own as an independent art

which had nothing to do with the theatre, an art closely allied

with music, dependent on music, an art which visualized music,

creating independently to a certain point and completed thereafter

by music.

But then, one day, she said:

“The silent film came to an end none too soon; it had gone as far as it

could go.”

I looked out of the window, puzzled. A vessel of considerable size was

passing up, toward the Sound. Noticing it, she added:

“I love a ship; any ship; I would go anywhere a ship was going. I never

see one that I don’t wish to be on it.”

“I don’t think I quite understand,” I said.

“About my loving a ship?”

“No, I understand that—entirely. It is what you say of the pictures ...

I can’t quite reconcile it with your article in Sayler’s book.”

“But that was theoretical. What I said just now related to existing

facts. The silent pictures had gone as far as they could go in the hands

they were in ... too far. In the right hands, they might have saved the

world. They spoke a universal language—the only one ever invented. They

could have brought all the nations together ... done away with the

narrow patriotism that childishly celebrates its own country above all

others, that has for its motto ‘My country, right or wrong,’ a sentiment

unworthy of grown-up, enlightened people. Human beings are pretty much

alike, the world over. Difference in language is the chief barrier

between them. With the interchange of films, which all but the blind

could read, I believe these barriers, in time would have disappeared.

Now ...”

“Now ...?”

“The barriers are busily being built up again. George Arliss’s

‘Disraeli,’ a beautiful talking picture, would be practically wasted in

any country but England and America. An operetta has a better chance.

There is a German one on 55th Street that you should see—‘Two Hearts in

Waltz Time’—clean and wholesome, with lovely music. You come away from

it with a kindlier feeling for Germany. Even better were the lovely

silent pictures, with such titles as were needed, in the language of

each country. I know something of that, from the letters that came to

me, from everywhere. Fine, friendly letters. The writers of those

letters could not be our enemies.”

V

“UNCLE VANYA” TAKES THE ROAD

“Uncle Vanya” reopened September 22, at the Booth Theatre, with the

original company, except for the part of Sonia, which was played by Zita

Johann. That Miss Johann is a successful actress has been sufficiently

demonstrated. Yet one could hardly fail to resent any change in the

perfect “Vanya” cast. It did something to the illusion. The scenes

between Helena and Sonia were still lovely, only Sonia wasn’t quite

Sonia any more, but just someone playing her part, pretending. Lillian

was all that she had been—my knowing her had not made her any less the

illusion, Chekhov’s Helena. It was a warm night, but the audience was

good—and appreciative.

When I saw her next day, she reproached me for not letting her know I

was there. A week later, I went again, and this time sent in a card,

specifying my seat. During the next intermission, a boy brought a little

note.

“I am playing for you,” she wrote. “I hope you will think I am not doing

it too badly.” And her kind heart prompted her to add: “God bless you!”

Then after two weeks, they were off for Boston, where they arrived at

perhaps the worst moment in Boston theatrical history. A great military

reunion was there—the streets were a bedlam—all day and far into the

night. Not many could get to the theatre, the Wilbur, and those who

could, were unable to hear the actors for the tumult outside. What an

atmosphere for Chekhov. Lillian wrote me:

It was such a nervous night. The theatre seemed like a barn to

speak in, and the noises from the sky and the streets made us all

wonder if the audience would tell what we were trying to do.

There are 500,000 strangers in Boston, all of them shouting,

blowing whistles, shooting, or making some sound to convince the

world that they are “happy.”

It is almost impossible to walk on the streets and today no motors

are allowed within the city limits. Concentration is difficult.

Just now, they are shooting beneath my window. Yesterday “Sonia”

came over to rehearse our scenes. We found it impossible.

Americans are at their very worst in such a mood, it seems to me.

These are the notices that Georgina cut from the papers. If they

are bad it is not surprising, as we were far from our best, last

night.

She did not read notices of herself, during an engagement; they made her

self-conscious, she said.

The Boston notices were by no means “bad.” They spoke of the hard

conditions under which the play was produced, the paid-for empty seats,

the perfect cast selected for Chekhov’s picture of human futility. “A

delicately beautiful dramatic tapestry,” the Globe called it, “its

colors subdued and blended, as only master craftsmen can blend.... The

company is superb, and the acting well-nigh perfect.” And the

Transcript, with a full-length three-column picture of her, paid a just

tribute to the play and its production. Lillian’s part it spoke of as

“elusive, wraith-like, symbol of the unattainable. At the end, like a

spirit of a passing dream, she drifts away, to leave them to their old

problems and their solitude.”

But for a week, the attendance was very bad. Then the visiting military

was gone, and the house filled. It would have been filled for a month

longer, if they could have stayed. But Chicago was waiting.

Lillian was always reading some book on the road. This time she was

re-reading “Wuthering Heights.”

What a beautiful piece of work is Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering

Heights.” It sweeps across the page like the winds on the moor

that she knew so well. From fury to tenderness, with such

understanding; how many lives had she lived before, to know so

much!

She firmly believed in mental and spiritual growth through

reincarnation. She was convinced that she had lived before—that now and

again, she caught glimpses of a former life. Personally, I was by no

means sure that mere human beings had known a previous existence, but I

was certain that Lillian had. Not a previous existence, but the same

existence, of which the present gave hardly more than a glimpse.

* * * * *

Chicago welcomed her with open arms: she had always been a favorite

there. She wrote:

“They keep me moving as fast as a machine-gun in this kind, friendly

Chicago. But I shall be so happy when I am by the East River, once more,

talking in the little den.”

As for the papers, they could not say enough good things of “Uncle

Vanya,” of Lillian, of the entire company. The _Post_ gave a column of

appreciation. It had a large picture of Lillian, and in part, said of

her:

If an embodiment were needed of our Siberian spirit from the

steppes, stalking from East to West, we’d say cast Miss Gish for

the part—only, make the spirit glide across the stage, as does

Miss Gish at her first entrance.... “Uncle Vanya,” as presented,

may not be Chekhov, but it is superbly Lillian Gish—and this

reviewer, for one, prefers Lillian Gish to Chekhov.

The _News_ spoke of her initial entrance, “Not only as a perfect

entrance for an actress to make out of the half-dream world of filmdom

into the world of flesh and blood, but the whole of Chekhov’s drama in a

fifteen-second gesture.”

Twenty-two years before, Lillian had last “played Chicago,” in a theatre

where one’s dressing-room was in a flooded basement, and one had to wear

a long skirt and high heels to avoid the Gerry officers. Now, the Gerry

officers did not mind any more—the Harris Theatre was beautiful and

well-appointed—one’s dressing-room had the fittings required by a modern

star. And there were flowers in it, and a little heap of notes and

cards—invitations, and requests for interviews. There had been no

interviews twenty-two years ago, and if the critics noticed her at all,

it had been obscurely and briefly, a line in some half-hidden corner.

Now, her picture looked out from every dramatic page, while at the

Goodman Theatre, in the foyer, along with those of Mrs. Siddons and John

Kemble, hung the “Romola” portrait, which Nikolai Fechin had painted,

the only portrait of a living actress so honored. Lillian had known that

following its exhibition in New York, the portrait had been bought for

the Chicago Art Institute, but did not know before that it had been hung

in the Goodman Theatre. Now, she was obliged to go and stand beside it

and be photographed, with a bevy of girls, and the papers published

that, too. And here, in one paragraph, we have a romance as complete as

any to be found in the story books.

It was on November 3, that “Uncle Vanya” reached Pittsburgh, a damp and

heavy season of gloom.

“Someone dropped my heart into the pit of a coal-mine,” wrote

Lillian. “I want so to find it, so I can dust it off before I

reach New York.”

To brighten her stay, and to get material for our work, she brought

“Aunt Emily” down from Massillon, not very far distant.

Pittsburgh was hardly a “Vanya” city, but the newspapers were kind—to

the play and to the company.

Perhaps it was not strange—but only seemed so—that “Uncle Vanya” had its

best houses in Newark, which had been substituted for Philadelphia. I am

told there are a good many Russians there—it may be that Chekhovians and

other cultured ones abound. At all events they did love “Vanya,” there,

and said so, and I shall always hold them in affection for the sake of

Jed Harris and his perfect company, and especially for the sake of

Chekhov, whom a good many people regard lightly, or do not regard at

all. The in-growing life of a Russian farm-house, the tragedy of a

cherry orchard, are meaningless to them, or only amusing. It was amusing

to Chekhov, too, who laughed—a little—that he might not weep—too much.

Lillian was at home again during the Newark engagement, going across the

river each evening and matinée afternoon, unpretentiously by bus, with

tiresome changes. She might have gone as befitted a great star, but she

preferred to go modestly, and, as she thought, more suitably.

And then, presently, “Vanya” was being given in New York again, this

time briefly, at the Biltmore. I saw it twice, there, and the charm of

it did not wane, but grew upon me exactly as the charm of the play

itself, when read quietly on a winter afternoon. It is my conviction

that such another company to play “Uncle Vanya” is not likely to be

assembled.

* * * * *

The “Vanya” engagement ended at the Biltmore on the evening of November

29, 1930. Following the matinée, Lillian had the company to her

apartment, for dinner. She was as pleased as a child with the prospect

of having them, and the arrangements. A friend had sent in some very

good Italian home-made claret, there was a big turkey, and the tables

were arranged in a T, in the living-room at Beekman Terrace.

Owing to the evening performance, the guests could not remain more than

an hour, but it was an hour to remember. Kate Mayhew beamed on her

younger companions. And when, that night, at the theatre, Griffith came

behind the scenes and greeted her with a rousing kiss, she declared,

later, to Lillian, that it was the happiest day of her life. “Dinner

with you, and kissed by Mr. Griffith! What more could anyone ask?”

Lillian had not seen Griffith for some time. It was a surprise,

therefore, when he came behind, at the end of the performance. It was

something more than eighteen years since the day she had come to find

Gladys Smith at the Biograph studio, and had first seen him, a tall man

walking up and down, humming “She’ll never bring them in.”

What a story of endeavor those eighteen years had told. I have given

many pages to it, but among the “Vanya” notices I find this unidentified

bit which reflects the spirit of it all:

Lillian Gish, who has ever held high the torch of beauty during

her entire career as stage and screen star, and with undeviating

purpose has been representative of the finest and best traditions

of the theater, adds another triumph to her list of admirable

achievements. As the ethereal and wistful Helena she is all the

author could have hoped for. Something more intangible she gives

to the rôle than her delicate loveliness, her undeniable charm and

the richness of her experience as a sincere and gifted actress.

VI

RELIVING THE YEARS

It became our custom to work two afternoons a week—Tuesdays and Fridays,

and on the hour I found her always ready. Whatever engagement she made,

she would keep it; whatever promise, even a partial one. I think she was

born with that conscience, and the years of rigid picture appointments

had kept it in repair. Griffith had said to her: “You, as the star, must

never fail to be there. The others will take their cue from you. _You_

must be on time.” And she always had been on time, and ahead of time.

Once, by a lapse of memory on my part, I missed an appointment when we

were to see one of the old pictures together. If she had scalded me with

censure, I should have felt better—if she had even shown a little

irritation, instead of anxiously helping me to find excuses, I could

better have borne it. Five minutes later, it had passed from her memory,

but it refuses to pass from mine.

We saw a number of the old pictures, that winter, as has appeared in

earlier chapters:

Lillian, in “Broken Blossoms,” the picture that had made her the

“world’s darling” and is still today recognized as the highest point

touched by the pictures, for beauty and artistic perfection. I insisted

on seeing this picture twice, for it seemed to me her masterpiece. From

the moment she enters the picture, her whole attitude, her face, her

hands, her feet, her bowed shoulders and bent back—every part and

feature of her, tell her crushed, stunted, trampled life.

Of course, her wistful beauty added to the pathos of it all, but Lillian

without beauty—if one can conceive that possibility—would have achieved

a triumph. When she crosses the street, stoops to pick up the tin foil

which she gathers to sell, looks into the shop window, touches the

flower she wants, one’s heart turns fairly sick for the broken child.

She had not wished to play the part, because it was of a child of

twelve. “I wanted Griffith to get a girl of that age.”

“But a girl of twelve could never have done it.”

She did not answer, only mentioned that she had been ill at the time.

“Do you consider it your best picture?”

She hesitated.

“If not, what would be your choice?”

Again she hesitated, then:

“‘White Sister,’ perhaps.”

We saw that, too, and “Romola,” and poor little Mimi, and Hester Prynne,

made when Lillian had become, beyond all question, “First Lady of the

Screen.”

It was toward the end of March that we saw the last of her great silent

pictures, “Wind.” The motion picture had arrived at mechanical

perfection when it was made. It was one of the several “swan songs” of

that ill-fated year. I thought it a remarkable picture—beautiful in its

stark _un_-beauty. It only seemed unfortunate in that it presented the

most sordid of human aspects against a background of wind-cursed wastes.

Lillian watched it almost without a word. I think she approved her part

in it, and why not? Technically, she was at her best. We drove home

rather silently.

“It was the exact opposite of ‘Broken Blossoms,’” I ventured to say.

“You mean ...”

“That _that_ was sheer beauty, while this——”

“But this had beauty, too, don’t you think?”

“Great beauty. The illusion of blowing sand ... Letty’s cumulative

terror of it—those were classic things. But I cannot imagine going

through the torture of seeing it again. The ending didn’t save it.”

“No. I wanted it to end with her complete madness ... with her rushing

out into the wind ... vanishing in the storm. They wouldn’t let me.”

“They thought they were giving it a happy ending.”

“I suppose so.”

We saw one more picture after that, “The Enemy,” her last silent film,

and our winter was at an end—a winter during which, by a form of

“eternal recurrence,” exactly symbolic of Ouspensky’s “duplicate

reincarnations of the past” I had watched her relive the years, change

from the young girl who had played Elsie Stoneman to the mature and

finished actress of “Wind,” of “One Romantic Night,” of Chekhov’s

Helena.

And in watching I seemed to guess something of her secret. Chiefly, as I

believe, it lies in the fact that she does not do violence to herself by

making herself over into the part she presents. She studies the

environment, the period, the hundred contributing details of the

situation, then lives her part in the play as she might have lived it in

reality. She takes on the psychology of it—what she conceives to be

such—and in some subtle fashion, fuses it with her own. Always, it is

Lillian who is playing, and always you want it to be Lillian, just as

all those people she has played—Hester Prynne, Mimi, the White Sister,

poor little Lucy Burrows, and Helena—would wish to be Lillian, if they

could see her in their parts. And the nearer they could be like her, the

better White Sister and Hester Prynne and Helena and the rest, they

would make. I am not saying that hers is the best dramatic method—my

equipment does not warrant that positive statement—I am only saying that

the effect she gives us is not of acting, but of life itself.

* * * * *

Sometimes I feel that I have dwelt overmuch on the subject of Lillian’s

beauty; again, I feel that I have said very little. It is such a

tremendous thing when considered in its relation to her material

being—such a baffling thing. She is not richly proportioned. In height

five feet four and one half inches, her weight is one hundred and ten

pounds. True, her slender feet are small, her limbs shapely; but her

arms are full long, her expressive hands rather large, her shoulders

narrow, her bust that of a young girl. It is strange, but these very

defects—defects in another—add to the charm that surrounds her like an

aureola. Her face—I cannot write about her face—I suppose the classic

purist might take it to pieces, discovering a variety of faults. Let him

do so. In doing it he will miss Lillian altogether—her beauty and the

magic of it. It has often been likened to music, the strains of Debussy,

which is well enough, as far as it goes, and I have found it in the

heart cry of Mascagni’s “Intermezzo,” in the “Eve of St. Agnes,” in the

dying fall of the “Londonderry Air.” To say that it is spiritual only

partly tells the story. It is that, but it is something more. It has a

haunting eerie quality that has to do with elfland, and lonely moors—the

face that seen by the homing lad at evening leaves him forever undone.

Scores of men and women, too, have written of it, have felt its

strangeness. Some have tried to write of it lightly, but underneath you

feel the magic working. They have glimpsed “Diana’s silver horn,” and

are forever changed.

[Illustration: “CAMILLE”]

VII

A FEW NOTES

In my notebook of this time I find these entries:

_March 31, 1931_: She has returned from a brief stay at Atlantic City.

“I read ‘Arrowsmith,’” she said. “I think it a fine book.

“I remembered something while I was there: something from my childhood:

I remembered Papa taking Dorothy and me there, once; I think we stayed

there overnight. I know we paddled in the water on the beach. How

strange, when my memory is so poor, that this should come back to me,

after all these years. I think we went from New York, so it must have

been just after Baltimore, when I was about five.”

_No date_: How tolerant she is! Whatever her belief or habits, she never

urges them upon others, or tries to disintegrate theirs. She never

smoked a cigarette in her life, but for years she has lived in a drift

of tobacco, without objection or criticism. She drinks nothing stronger

than mild wine, but provides generously for her guests.

_April 5_: Artists are always wanting to paint Lillian. Just now she is

posing for Sorine, the distinguished Russian painter who did the Pavlowa

which hangs in the Luxembourg. Lillian’s portrait is to hang there, he

says, and some day in the Louvre. I saw it today, with her. It is

vividly, delicately done.

_No date_: Today she said: “I attended a symphony concert, last night,

with some friends. In the box with us was Gabrilowitsch. I thought of

what the music meant to him that it did not mean to me. What he heard

that missed me entirely. Musicians have an entire world of their own. No

other art has that in the same degree. Science has it, I suppose. But

music seems different,—of a world still farther removed.”

_April 15_: How does she find time for all the things she does? She has

no secretary, now, yet somehow keeps up conscientiously with her letter

answering—of itself a heavy task. Then, home duties, social demands,

this posing every day for Sorine; also, for a young German girl,

Fräulein von Bismarck; reading plays; this work of ours, which takes no

end of time, and thought. I don’t see how she manages it all—but she

does.

I suppose things trouble her, but she remains serene. There is about her

a detachment from the worries of life that suggests Karma Yoga, and is

that, I have no doubt, for she is versed in Eastern Philosophy.

Whether she “suffers fools gladly,” or not, I do not know. I only know

that she suffers them—without complaint.

She reads omnivorously, but always, as I think, seeking the best, and

apparently reading with care and reflection.

A few days ago I lent her Brand Whitlock’s latest book, “Narcissus,”

which tells a Belgian legend of Van Dyck. Today she said: “I read it

twice—for the story, first, then for the beauty of it—the style. It has

great charm. I want to read it again.” Then she told me a story of Van

Dyck and Frans Hals, which somewhere she had read, or heard.

* * * * *

_April, 1932._ Something has happened, or is in the process of

happening. Since the conclusion of “Uncle Vanya” Lillian has given

little serious consideration to theatrical matters, putting aside as

unsuitable a variety of offered parts. A new prospect now presents

itself—one that appeals to her taste and imagination: a group of

influential citizens of Denver, Colorado, headed by Mr. Delos Chappell,

propose to refurbish and reopen the ancient Opera House of the little

“ghost mining town” of Central City, with a week’s presentation of

“Camille,” at fancy prices, for the benefit of the University of Denver.

Robert Edmond Jones is to stage and direct the production, with Lillian

as Casting Director, herself in the title rôle. She is deeply

interested—has secured Raymond Hackett for the part of Armand, the

rehearsing to begin at once.

From a special to THE NEW YORK TIMES.

Denver, Col., July 16.—In an impressive ceremony, amid the merry

laughter of “pioneer” belles and gay young men, and at a cost of

$250,000, the famous Central City Opera House was brought to life

tonight after a silence of fifty years.

Men, women and children from the Atlantic Seaboard and the Pacific

Coast came to this “phantom” village, once the miners’ capital.

Daughters and sons, granddaughters and grandsons of pioneers who

once made those same walls vibrate with their applause were there

for the gala opening of the revival, in dress such as their

ancestors wore at the theatre when it was new. Some of the gowns,

handed down through the fifty years, were once heard to rustle

down those same aisles. Every person in the audience represented

some famous character of the time when Central City was the centre

of Colorado’s gold mining industry. “Camille” typified to

perfection the taste of the ’80s in the theatre.

Miss Lillian Gish, as Marguerite Gautier, takes the leading rôle,

with Raymond Hackett playing opposite her as Armand. It was the

first time “Camille” has played in the old opera house in fifty

years.

VIII

L’ENVOI

And so, at last, the plowman, turning the furrows of life, comes to the

boundary that divides the known from the unknown—the wilderness from the

sown field. Whatever we may one day find beyond, is already there in

every detail—only, I lack the clairvoyant gift, and turn for a brief

backward glimpse. It is no vision of artistic triumph that comes to me

tonight ... not the memory of Chekhov’s radiant heroine ... not the

triste picture of that broken flower of the Limehouse ... something even

more real than these: a real child, trouping with wandering players,

away from a mother’s care ... a slim-legged little girl, who slept on

station benches and telegraph tables, who running across a foot-bridge

lost her poor possessions in the swift black water, who from a train or

hotel window stared silently into the night.

“What are you looking at, Lillian?”

“Nothing, Aunt Alice, just looking.”

End of Project Gutenberg's Life and Lillian Gish, by Albert Bigelow Paine