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- Herausgeber: PubMe
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
Just off Union Square, New York City, there is a stately old brownstone house on which future generations some day may place a tablet to commemorate the place where David W. Griffith and Mary Pickford were first associated with moving pictures. Here has dwelt romance of many colors. A bird of brilliant plumage, so the story goes, first lived in this broad-spreading five-story old brownstone that still stands on Fourteenth Street between Fifth Avenue and Broadway, vibrant with life and the ambitions and endeavors of its present occupants.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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Linda Arvidson
When the movies were young
Table of contents
CHAPTER I ELEVEN EAST FOURTEENTH STREET
CHAPTER II ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS
CHAPTER III CLIMACTERIC—AN EARTHQUAKE AND A MARRIAGE
CHAPTER IV YOUNG AMBITIONS AND A FEW JOLTS
CHAPTER V THE MOVIES TEMPT
CHAPTER VI MOVIE ACTING DAYS—AND AN “IF”
CHAPTER VII D. W. GRIFFITH DIRECTS HIS FIRST MOVIE
CHAPTER VIII DIGGING IN
CHAPTER IX FIRST PUBLICITY AND EARLY SCENARIOS
CHAPTER X WARDROBE—AND A FEW PERSONALITIES
CHAPTER XI MACK SENNETT GETS STARTED
CHAPTER XII ON LOCATION—EXPERIENCES PLEASANT AND OTHERWISE
CHAPTER XIII AT THE STUDIO
CHAPTER XIV MARY PICKFORD HAPPENS ALONG
CHAPTER XV ACQUIRING ACTORS AND STYLE
CHAPTER XVI CUDDEBACKVILLE
CHAPTER XVII “PIPPA PASSES” FILMED
CHAPTER XVIII GETTING ON
CHAPTER XIX TO THE WEST COAST
CHAPTER XX IN CALIFORNIA AND ON THE JOB
CHAPTER XXI BACK HOME AGAIN
CHAPTER XXII IT COMES TO PASS
CHAPTER XXIII THE FIRST TWO-REELER
CHAPTER XXIV EMBRYO STARS
CHAPTER XXV MARKING TIME
CHAPTER XXVI THE OLD DAYS END
CHAPTER XXVII SOMEWHAT DIGRESSIVE
CHAPTER XXVIII “THE BIRTH OF A NATION”
CHAPTER I ELEVEN EAST FOURTEENTH STREET
CHAPTER II ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS
But now to go back to the beginning.
It was a night in the summer of 1904 in my dear and fascinating old San Francisco, before the life we all knew and loved had been broken in two, never to be mended, by the disaster of the great fire and earthquake. At the old Alcazar Theatre the now historic stock company was producing Mr. Hall Caine’s drama “The Christian.”
In the first act the fishermaidens made merry in the village square.
Unknown to family or friends, and with little pride in my humble beginning, I mingled as one of the fishergirls. Three dollars and fifty cents a week was the salary Fred Belasco (David’s brother) paid me for my bit of Hall Caine interpretation, so I, for one, had no need to be horrified some four years later when I was paid three dollars a day for playing the same fishermaiden in support of Mary Pickford, who, under Mr. Griffith’s direction, was making Glory Quayle into a screen heroine.
Here at the old Alcazar were wonderful people I could worship. There was Oza Waldrop, and John Craig, and Mary Young, Eleanor Gordon, Frances Starr, and Frank Bacon. Kindly, sweet Frank Bacon whose big success, years later, as Lightnin’ Bill Jones, in his own play “Lightnin’,” made not the slightest change in his simple, unpretentious soul. Mr. Bacon had written a play called “In the Hills of California.” It was to be produced for a week’s run at Ye Liberty Theatre, Oakland, California, and I was to play the ingénue.
One little experience added to another little experience fortified me with sufficient courage to call on managers of visiting Eastern road companies who traveled short of “maids,” “special guests at the ball,” and “spectators at the races.” New York was already beckoning, and without funds for a railroad ticket the only way to get there was to join a company traveling that way.
A summing up of previous experiences showed a recital at Sherman and Clay Hall and two weeks on tour in Richard Walton Tully’s University of California’s Junior farce “James Wobberts, Freshman.”
In the company were Mr. Tully and his then wife, Eleanor Gates, the author; Emil Kreuske, for some years now “Bill Nigh,” the motion picture director; Milton Schwartz, who took to law and now practices in Hollywood; Dick Tully and his wife Olive Vail. Elmer Harris of the original college company did not go. Elmer is now partner to Frank E. Woods along with Thompson Buchanan in Mr. Wood’s new producing company.
The recital at Sherman and Clay Hall on Sutter Street was a most ambitious effort. My job-hunting pal, Harriet Quimby, a girl I had met prowling about the theatres, concluded we were getting nowhere and time was fleeting. So we hit on a plan to give a recital in San Francisco’s Carnegie Hall, and invite the dramatic critics hoping they would come and give us good notices.
The Homer Henley Quartette which we engaged would charge twenty dollars. The rent of the hall was twenty. We should have had in hand forty dollars, and between us we didn’t own forty cents.
Harriet Quimby knew Arnold Genthe, and, appreciating her rare beauty, Mr. Genthe said he would make her photos for window display for nothing. Oscar Mauer did the same for me, gratis. Rugs and furniture we borrowed, and the costumes by advertising in the program, we rented cheaply.
We understood only this much of politics: Jimmy Phelan, our Mayor (afterwards Senator James H. Phelan) was a very wealthy man, charitably disposed, and one day we summoned up sufficient courage to tell him our trouble. Most attentively and respectfully he heard us, and without a moment’s hesitation gave us the twenty.
So we gave the recital. We sold enough tickets to pay the Homer Henleys, but not enough to pay the debt to Mr. Phelan. He’s never been paid these many years though I’ve thought of doing it often, and will do it some day.
However, the critics came and they gave us good notices, but the recital didn’t seem to put much of a dent in our careers. Harriet Quimby soon achieved New York via The Sunset Magazine. In New York she “caught on,” and became dramatic critic on Leslie’s Weekly.
The honor of being the first woman in America to receive an aviator’s license became hers, as also that of being the first woman to pilot a monoplane across the English Channel. That was in the spring of 1912, a few months before her death while flying over Boston Harbor.
* * * * *
Mission Street, near Third, was in that unique section called South-of-the-Slot. The character of the community was such, that to reside there, or even to admit of knowing residents there meant complete loss of social prestige. Mission Street, which was once the old road that led over blue and yellow lupin-covered hills out to the Mission Dolores of the Spanish Fathers, and was later the place where the elegantly costumed descendants of the forty-niners who had struck pay dirt (and kept it) strolled, held, at the time of which I speak, no reminder of its departed glory except the great romantic old Grand Opera House, which, amid second-hand stores, pawn-shops, cheap restaurants, and saloons, languished in lonely grandeur.
Once in my young life Richard Mansfield played there; Henry Irving and Ellen Terry gave a week of Shakespearean repertoire; Weber and Fields came from New York for the first time and gave their show, but failed. San Franciscans thought that Kolb and Dill, Barney Bernard, and Georgie O’Ramey, who held forth nightly at Fischer’s Music Hall, were just as good.
At the time of the earthquake a grand opera company headed by Caruso was singing there. Between traveling luminaries, lesser lights glimmered on the historic old stage. And for a long time, when the theatre was called Morosco’s Grand Opera House, ten, twenty, and thirty blood-and-thunder melodrama held the boards.
At this stage in its career, and hardly one year before the great disaster, a young actor who called himself Lawrence Griffith was heading toward the Coast in a show called “Miss Petticoats.” Katherine Osterman was the star. The company stranded in San Francisco.
Melbourne MacDowell, in the last remnants of the faded glory cast upon him by Fanny Davenport, was about to tread the sacred stage of the old Grand Opera House, putting on a repertoire of the Sudermann and Sardou dramas.
Frank Bacon, always my kind adviser, suggested I should try my luck with this aggregation. So I trotted merrily down, wandered through dark alleyways, terribly thrilled, for Henry Irving had come this same way and I was walking where once he had walked.
I was to appear as a boy servant in “Fedora.” I remember only one scene. It was in a sort of court room with a civil officer sitting high and mighty and calm and unperturbed on a high stool behind a high desk. I entered the room and timidly approached the desk. A deep stern voice that seemed to rise from some dark depths shouted at me, “At what hour did your master leave Blu Bla?”
I shivered and shook and finally stammered out the answer, and was mighty glad when the scene was over.
Heavens! Who was this person, anyhow?
His name, I soon learned, was Griffith—Lawrence Griffith—I never could abide that “Lawrence”! Though, as it turned out afterward, our married life might have been dull without that Christian name as a perpetual resource for argument.
Afterward, to my great joy, Mr. Griffith confided to me that he had taken the name “Lawrence” only for the stage. His real name was “David,” “David Wark,” but he was going to keep that name dark until he was a big success in the world, and famous. And as yet he didn’t know, although he seemed very lackadaisical about it, I thought, whether he’d be great as an actor, stage director, grand opera star, poet, playwright, or novelist.
I wasn’t the only one who thought he might have become a great singer. Once a New York critic reviewing a première of one of David Griffith’s motion pictures, said: “The most interesting feature of Mr. Griffith’s openings is to hear his wonderful voice.”
“ Lawrence” condescended to a little conversation now and then. He was quite encouraging at times. Said I had wonderful eyes for the stage and if I ever went to New York and got in right, I’d get jobs “on my eyes.” (Sounded very funny—getting a job “on one’s eyes.”) Advised me never to get married if I expected to stay on the stage. Told me about the big New York actors: Leslie Carter, who had just been doing DuBarry; and David Belasco, and what a wonderful producer he was; and dainty Maude Adams; and brilliant Mrs. Fiske; and Charles Frohman; and Richard Mansfield in “Monsieur Beaucaire”; and Broadway; and Mrs. Fernandez’s wonderful agency; and how John Drew got his first wonderful job through her agency at one hundred and twenty-five dollars a week!
I was eager to learn more of the big theatrical world three thousand miles away. I invited Mr. Griffith out home to lunch one day. A new world soon opened up for me—the South. The first Southerner I’d ever met was Mr. Griffith. I had known of the South only from my school history; but the one I had studied didn’t tell of Colonel Jacob Wark Griffith, David’s father, who fought under Stonewall Jackson in the Civil War, and was called “Thunder Jake” because of his roaring voice. He owned lots of negroes, gambled, and loved Shakespeare. There was big “Sister Mattie” who taught her little brother his lessons and who, out on the little front stoop, just before bedtime, did her best to answer all the questions the inquisitive boy would ask about the stars and other wonders.
This was all very different from being daughter to a Norseman who had settled out on San Francisco’s seven hills in the winds and fogs.
The South began to loom up as a land of romance.
CHAPTER III CLIMACTERIC—AN EARTHQUAKE AND A MARRIAGE
When the Melbourne MacDowell repertory season closed, the stranded actors of the “Miss Petticoats” Company were again on the loose. While San Francisco supported two good stock companies, the Alcazar presenting high-class drama and the Central given over to melodrama, their rosters had been completed for the season and they offered rather lean pickings. But Lawrence Griffith worked them both to the best of his persuasive powers.
Early fall came with workless weeks, and finally, to conserve his shrinking treasury, our young actor who had been domiciled in the old Windsor Hotel, a most moderately priced place on Market and Fourth Streets, had to bunk in with Carlton, the stage carpenter of the MacDowell show, in a single-bedded single room. Mr. Carlton was on a social and mental plane with the actor, but his financial status was decidedly superior.
The doubling-up arrangement soon grew rather irksome. What with idle days, a flattened purse, and isolation from theatrical activities, gloom and discouragement enveloped young Griffith, although he never seemed to worry.
He had a trunk full of manuscripts—one-act plays, long plays, and short stories and poems! To my unsophisticated soul it was all very wonderful. What a cruel, unappreciative world, to permit works of genius to languish lonely amid stage wardrobe and wigs and greasy make-up!
On pleasant days when the winds were quiet and the fogs hung no nearer than Tamalpais across the Gate, we would hie ourselves to the Ocean Beach, where, fortified with note-book and pencil the actor-poet would dictate new poems and stories.
One day young Lawrence brought along a one-act play called “In Washington’s Time.” The act had been headlined over the Keith Circuit. It had never played in San Francisco. He wondered if he could do anything with it.
* * * * *
It was approaching the hop-picking season. The stranded young actor’s funds were reaching bottom. Something must be done.
In California, in those days, quite nice people picked hops. Mother and father, young folks, and the children, went. Being the dry season, they’d live in the open; pick hops by day, and at night dance and sing.
Lawrence Griffith decided it would be a healthful, a colorful, and a more remunerative experience than picking up theatrical odd jobs, to join the hop pickers up Ukiah way. So for a few weeks he picked hops and mingled with thrifty, plain people and operatic Italians who drank “dago red” and sang the sextette from “Lucia” while they picked their portion. Here he saved money and got atmosphere for a play. Sent me a box of sweet-smelling hops from the fields, too!
A brief engagement as leading ingénue with Florence Roberts had cheered me in the interval, even though Fred Belasco made me feel utterly unworthy of my thirty-five dollar salary. “My God,” said he when I presented my first week’s voucher, “they don’t give a damn what they do with my money.”
However, Mr. Griffith soon returned to San Francisco. He hoped to do something with his playlet. Martin Beck, the vaudeville magnate, who was then manager of the Orpheum Theatre and booked acts over the Orpheum Circuit, said to let him see a rehearsal.
Such excitement! I was to play a little Colonial girl and appear at our own Orpheum Theatre in an act that had played New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and other awesome cities. Mr. Beck booked for the week and gave us a good salary, but could not offer enough consecutive bookings to make a road tour pay, so that was that.
In the meantime Oliver Morosco had opened his beautiful Majestic Theatre in upper Market Street, with “In the Palace of the King.” The New York company lacking a blind Inez, I got the part, and the dramatic critic, Ashton Stevens, gave me a great notice. In the next week’s bill, “Captain Barrington,” I played a scene which brought me a paragraph from Mr. Stevens captioned “An Actress with more than Looks.” On the strength of this notice Mr. Morosco sent me to play ingénues at his Burbank Theatre in Los Angeles, at twenty-five dollars per week.
Barney Bernard was stepping out just now. He wanted to see what he could do away from the musical skits of Kolb and Dill. So he found a play called “The Financier.” “Lawrence” Griffith had a little job in it. The hardest part of the job was to smoke a cigar in a scene—it nearly made him ill. But he had a good season, six weeks with salary paid.
That over, came a call to Los Angeles to portray the Indian, Alessandro, in a dramatization of Helen Hunt Jackson’s famous novel “Ramona.”
It was pleasant for us to see each other. We went out to San Gabriel Mission together. Mr. Griffith afterwards used the Mission as the setting for a short story—a romantic satire which he called “From Morning Until Night.” His brief engagement over, “Lawrence” went back to San Francisco, and my Morosco season ending shortly afterward, I followed suit.
In San Francisco, Nance O’Neill was being billed. She was returning from her Australian triumphs in Ibsen, Sardou, and Sudermann. The company, with McKee Rankin as manager and leading man, included John Glendenning, father of Ernest; Clara T. Bracy, sister of Lydia Thompson of British Blonde Burlesque and Black Crook fame; Paul Scardon from the Australian Varieties and now husband of a famous cinema star, Betty Blythe; and Jane Marbury.
Mr. Griffith, hoping for a chance to return East with the company, applied for a job and was offered “bits” which he accepted. Then one day, Mr. Rankin being ill, Lawrence Griffith stepped into the part of the Father in “Magda.” Miss O’Neill thought so well of his performance and the notices he received that she offered him leading parts for the balance of the season.
When in the early spring of 1906, the company departed from San Francisco, it left me with my interest in life decidedly diminished—but Lawrence Griffith had promised to return, and when he came back things would be different.
So, while the O’Neill company was working close to Minneapolis, I was “resting.” I “rested” until eighteen minutes to five on the morning of April 18th, when something happened.
“ Earthquake?”
“ I don’t know, but I think we had better get up,” suggested my sister.
* * * * *
I sent Lawrence a long telegram about what had happened to us, but he received it by post. And then about a week later I received a letter from Milwaukee telling me that Miss O’Neill and the company were giving a benefit for desolate San Francisco, and that I had better come on and meet him in Boston where the company was booked for a six weeks’ engagement.
So to Fillmore Street I went to beg for a railroad ticket to Boston, gratis. There was a long line of people waiting. I took my place at the end of the line. In time I reached the man at the desk.
“ Where to?”
“ Boston.”
“ What is your occupation?”
“ Actress.”
I thought it unwise to confide my matrimonial objective. No further questions, however. I was given a yard of ticket and on May 9th I boarded a refugee train at the Oakland mole, all dressed up in Red Cross clothes that fitted me nowhere.
But I had a lovely lunch, put up by neighbors, some fried chicken, and two small bottles of California claret. In another box, their stems stuck in raw potatoes, some orange blossoms off a tree that stood close to our tent.
Ah, dear old town, good-bye!
Every night I cried myself to sleep.
Thus I went to meet my bridegroom.
* * * * *
Boston!
Everything a bustle! People, and people, and people! Laughing, happy, chattering people who didn’t seem to know and apparently didn’t care what had happened to us out there by the bleak Pacific. I was so annoyed at them. Their life was still normal. Though I knew they had helped bounteously, I was annoyed.
But here He comes! And we jumped into a cab—with a license, but no ring. In the unusual excitement that had been forgotten, so we had to turn back in the narrow street and find a jeweler. Then we drove to Old North Church, where Paul Revere had hung out his lantern on his famous ride (which Mr. Griffith has since filmed in “America”), and our names were soon written in the register.
* * * * *
The end of June, and New York! Just blowing up for a thunderstorm. I had never heard real thunder, nor seen lightning, nor been wet by a summer rain. What horrible weather! The wind blew a gale, driving papers and dust in thick swirling clouds. Of all the miserable introductions to the city of my dreams and ambitions, New York City could hardly have offered me a more miserable one!
We lived in style for a few days at the Hotel Navarre on Seventh Avenue and Thirty-ninth Street, and then looked for a “sublet” for the summer. I’d never heard of a “sublet” before.
We ferreted around and found a ducky little place, so cheap—twenty-five dollars a month—on West Fifty-sixth Street, overlooking the athletic grounds of the Y. M. C. A., where I was tremendously amused watching the fat men all wrapped up in sweaters doing their ten times around without stopping—for reducing purposes.
But we had little time to waste in such observations. A job must be had for the fall. In a few weeks we signed with the Rev. Thomas Dixon (fresh from his successful “Clansman”); my husband as leading man and I as general understudy, in “The One Woman.” Rehearsals were to be called in about two months.
To honeymoon, or not to honeymoon—to work or not to work. Work it was, and David started on a play.
And he worked. He walked the floor while dictating and I took it down on the second-hand typewriter I had purchased somewhere on Amsterdam Avenue for twenty dollars. The only other investment of the summer had been at Filene’s in Boston where I left my Red Cross sartorial contributions and emerged in clothes that had a more personal relation to me.
They were happy days. The burdens were shared equally. My husband was a splendid cook; modestly said, so was I. He loved to cook, singing negro songs the while, and whatever he did, whether cooking or writing or washing the dishes, he did it with the same earnestness and cheerfulness. Felt his responsibilities too, and had a sort of mournful envy of those who had established themselves.
Harriet Quimby was now writing a weekly article for Leslie’s, and summering gratis at the old Oriental Hotel at Manhattan Beach as payment for publicizing the social activities of the place. Beach-bound one day, she called at our modest ménage, beautifully dressed, with wealthy guests in their expensive car. As the car drove off, Mr. Griffith gazing sadly below from our window five flights up, as sadly said “She’s a success.”
The play came along fine, owing much to our experiences in California. One act was located in the hop fields, and there were Mexican songs that Mr. Griffith had first heard rendered by native Mexicans who sang in “Ramona.” Another act was in a famous old café in San Francisco, The Poodle Dog. It was christened “A Fool and a Girl.” The fool was an innocent youth from Kentucky, but the girl, being from San Francisco, was more piquant.
We’d been signed for the fall, and we felt we’d done pretty well by the first summer. I’d learned to relish the funny little black raspberries and not to be afraid of thunderstorms—they were not so uncertain as earthquakes.
And now rehearsals are called for Mr. Dixon’s “The One Woman.” They lasted some weeks before we took to the road and opened in Norfolk, Virginia, where we drew our first salaries, seventy-five for him and thirty-five for her. Nice, it was, and we hoped it would be a long season.
CHAPTER IV YOUNG AMBITIONS AND A FEW JOLTS
But it wasn’t.
After two months on the road we received our two weeks’ notice. For half Mr. Griffith’s salary, Mr. Dixon had engaged another leading man, who, he felt, would adequately serve the cause. So, sad at heart and not so wealthy, we returned to the merry little whirl of life in the theatrical metropolis of the U. S. A. We had one asset—the play. Good thing we had not frivoled away those precious summer weeks in seeking cooling breezes by Coney’s coral strand!
Late that fall my husband played a small part in a production of “Salome” at the Astor Theatre under Edward Ellsner’s direction. Mr. Ellsner was looking for a play for Pauline Frederick. Mr. Griffith suggested his play and Mr. Ellsner was sufficiently interested to arrange for a reading for Miss Frederick and her mother. They liked it; so did Mr. Ellsner; and so the play was sent on to Mr. James K. Hackett, Miss Frederick’s manager at that time.
* * * * *
