Chapter X: Part TWO: I (2)

Following this presentation, a print of the picture was hurried to Washington, and shown to President Wilson, members of the Cabinet, and their families. A few days later, February 20, this print was run in New York, for the censors, and others concerned. Thomas Dixon, author of the story, was present, and declared excitedly, to Griffith: “‘The Clansman’ is too tame a title for what you have done. Let’s call it ‘The Birth of a Nation,’” which became its title, then and there.

On March 3, the picture was shown at the Liberty Theatre, New York City, at two dollars a seat, the first time a motion picture ever became a full-sized theatre attraction. Even so, it was in for a record run.

* * * * *

Lillian’s success as Elsie Stoneman was a complete surprise to her, for she had not liked the part, and then it had dragged on so long. But when the notices poured in, she must have begun to wonder if anybody but herself and Walthall were in the picture. Their faces together, or hers alone, looked out from every page. From New York, Thomas Dixon wrote:

_My dear Miss Gish_:

I don’t care to tell you all the beautiful things I’d like to say
about you and your exquisite work in our picture....

Between the acts, last week, a distinguished young man of
letters—editor of a great magazine—found me in the lobby, dragged
me one side and whispered “For God’s sake, tell me quick, who is
the glorious little girl playing Elsie?” I answered, “Miss Lillian
Gish.” “I want to meet her right away! Where is she?” he gasped.

He’s only one of many hundreds. How can I ever thank you for such
work? Believe me it belongs to the big things in life for which
money never pays. I am your debtor for services, for which I not
only could never pay but don’t know how to thank you....

Sincerely,
THOMAS DIXON.

Dorothy fortunately had no part in “The Birth of a Nation”—fortunately, because she was overtaken by an accident when the picture was well under way. Of course, it was just a coincidence that a fortune-teller, only a little while before, had warned her against an automobile accident. Anybody could do that. Nevertheless, he _had_ warned her—and she _would_ walk across the street where automobiles were passing. On that particular day—it was Thanksgiving—she had been lunching with Griffith and Mae Marsh and Miriam Cooper, and coming out of the restaurant, held to Griffith’s coat, demanding that he buy her something.

“Oh, Mr. Griffith, please buy me some candy, Mr. Griffith. Please buy me some chewing gum. Oh, Mr. Griffith—please——”

They were crossing a street just then, the Boulevard, crowded with cars—the others a little way in advance of Dorothy. She never knew quite what happened, but in the wink of an eye, she was down on the ground on her face; a car that had struck her in a variety of places—was standing with its front wheel between her feet, one of which it had crushed.

Dorothy’s disaster was not all sorrow. Lillian was with her most of the time. Friends were willing to entertain her steadily. Griffith had a miniature screen installed, with a projection machine, and gave her a private view of so much of “The Birth of a Nation” as was then complete. No damaged young queen had ever been so royally entertained. In a reasonably brief space, she was on her feet—limping for a time, but otherwise as well as ever.

VIII

“INTOLERANCE”

The Griffith lot was at 4500 Sunset Boulevard, on the edge of Hollywood, then a residential suburb, named for one of the earliest homes there. Hollywood residents observed with curiosity, but with no special alarm, the interesting picture-making plants that were appearing here and there in their neighborhood. California has a taste for publicity:

“Ladies and gentlemen, since there seems to be nothing further to be said for the Dear Departed, I should be glad to make a few remarks about California.”

That Griffith, on the very edge of Hollywood, had made the great picture then sweeping the country, was something on which to “make a few remarks,” though it is unlikely that even the most sanguine residents guessed that within a comparatively brief time, their little suburb would become the center of one of the world’s richest industries; a collection of amazing architectural construction; a strange, irrational region, in and about whose environs frail cities and quaint villages, fair palaces and weird ships and oceans, would appear and vanish, beyond the dreams of all the fairylands of time and change; that with these things would assemble an exhibit of feminine loveliness and masculine perfection, of human freaks and human vanities, such as probably no other planet could show.

The change began quickly enough, now. There was money to be made in Hollywood—not only by producers, but by actors. On Broadway, men and women with lean parts, or no parts at all, turned their eyes westward. The exodus set in. The word “Hollywood” began to be passed about like some magic bauble, a talisman. Once more, California held out to men and women a lure of gold.

* * * * *

The little group of players on Sunset Boulevard hardly knew what to make of the first incursion of “real actors” that swept in upon them. They had two ideas about it: they wondered if they would be able to keep their jobs, and if so, would they learn how to act. They realized, presently, that it made very little difference to them. They did keep their jobs, and they did not learn how to act—not in the stage way. It was the newcomers who had to learn—if they stayed.

Most of them did stay—adapted themselves. Producers with new, big undertakings, were all about. Griffith himself, returning from first showings of the “Birth,” began on what promised to be a still more important, more expensive, picture.

It started as rather a small venture, with Mae Marsh and Bobby Harron in the leading parts. It was to be called “The Mother and the Law,” based upon a famous murder case, wherein an innocent man, through intolerance—man’s inhumanity to man—was brought to the foot of the scaffold.

Lillian was not to have a part in this new play. For one thing, she was working in another picture—as Annie, in “Enoch Arden”—one of the best of her early films—and in Richard Harding Davis’ story of “Captain Macklin.” And then, Griffith perhaps did not think it wise to push her forward too fast.

But one night, after a day of hard rehearsal, he picked up a copy of Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” and his eye caught:

... endlessly rocks the cradle,
Uniter of Here and Hereafter.

He saw a picture: a girl—Lillian—endlessly rocking the cradle of humanity, binding the ages together—ages of human intolerance.

Feverishly, he mapped out a new scenario, far-reaching, comprehensive, covering the great episodes of intolerance: back through the religious wars, with the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, through the Crucifixion, back to the days of Belshazzar, tyrant of Babylon. Beginning with the modern story, he would lead it through episodes of tyranny and bloodshed, down to the blind cruelty and intolerance of today. And always, between, that young mother, endlessly rocking the cradle of the child who, in every age, must pay the price.

The preparations for “Intolerance,” as the new production was now called, were architecturally far more pretentious and costly than those for “The Birth of a Nation,” or for any spectacle play up to that time. Gigantic plaster elephants rose a hundred feet above the street level; the towering buildings of Babylon stretched, a profile of ancient Asia, across the sky. Nubian lions roared; a motley assemblage of Persians, Egyptians, Babylonians, priests, dancing-girls, charioteers, and fifty-seven other varieties, gathered for rehearsal. Says Griffith’s biographer:

The luncheon hour “on location” composed one of the most
picturesque sights ever witnessed by human eyes. At times there
were as many as fifteen thousand men, women and children scattered
about the various lots during the noon hour. Thousands of horses
and sheep grazed along the green enclosures, their shaking heads
mingling with the flashing swords and helmets of the fighting-men.

When the great mob scenes were being photographed, it seemed as
though the entire population of Los Angeles had come out to
Griffith’s place, to take part in the various pageants and mighty
rushing armies. Actors from other studios—many of them prominent
stars—joined in the scenes.

The writer assures us that in spite of the fierce conflicts waged on the parapets and walls and towers, only sixty-seven players were injured, and these but slightly; also that a modern field hospital, with surgeons, nurses and ambulances, was maintained.

Actors whose names were well known, or have since become so, first appeared on the screen in “Intolerance”: Count Erich von Stroheim, Frank Bennett, Tully Marshall, Constance Talmadge. Constance was an extra, used at first for rehearsal, but presently—in the “Mountain Girl who worshipped Belshazzar from afar”—Griffith could see only Constance, so gave her the part.

Griffith had money to work with, now, and spent it like Belshazzar himself. “Intolerance” required a year and a half to make, and an expenditure of nearly two million dollars.

Some of the items are impressive: A jeweled costume for the “Princess Beloved” cost seven thousand dollars; the dancing-girls at the feast of Belshazzar, twenty-thousand—a good deal more than they ever cost that early Belshazzar, even in his palmiest days, but of course these were war prices.

“Intolerance” was shown for the first time at the Liberty Theatre, New York, September 6, 1916. Its magnificence impressed the public. What wouldn’t Griffith do next? On the night of April 6, 1917, Griffith personally presented “Intolerance,” at the Drury Lane Theatre, London.

On that day, the United States entered the World War.

IX

THERE WERE NO LOVE AFFAIRS

Lillian did not consider that she was really in the new picture. To Nell she wrote: “I am not in it in person, but my heart runs all through it—and it seems more to belong to me than all my other work together.” As of course it did—the mother who, through the ages, rocked humanity’s cradle.

She had made a number of smaller pictures, meantime—very good pictures, if we consult the notices, which even sometimes forgot to remember that she was the “most beautiful blonde in the world.” How tired she had become of that phrase! “If they want an angel on a wire, they send for me,” she told one reporter, who managed to omit Belasco, though he did call her “a young goddess” and a “daffodil.” You couldn’t stop them.

The pictures she made at this time were important only as they were steps of development—program pictures, little remembered today. “Diane of the Follies,” in which she played a kind of vamp and wore remarkable costumes, was more memorable.

“But Diane was very easy to play,” she said afterwards. “Anybody can play a character of that sort—it plays itself. It is the part of a good woman, whose colorless life has to be made interesting, that is hard.”

Her own life could hardly be said to be exciting. There were no love affairs. Plenty of opportunities, but she was always too busy for such things, or for the social life, of which there was now a good deal. “I was not gay enough for the parties; Dorothy was sought, for those. They didn’t care much about me.” And once she wrote:

“When Dorothy goes to a party, the party becomes a party: When I go to a party, I’m afraid it very often stops being a party.... She, as I once heard a girl described in a play, is like a bright flag flying in the breeze.

“All music, even the worst, seems so beautiful to her. All people amuse her.... I have fun, too, but it is only the fun I get out of apparently never-ending work.”

It was true, though: Work was her “fun”—work and study—always a book under her arm: often a French one.

And being kind to those about her—that was fun, too. She never failed to acknowledge the smallest service—from the electricians, the stage-hands, the humblest property-boy. A friend of those days writes me:

“It was not only that Lillian was courteous to the electricians and the rest; many actors are that ... she was just another workman. She happened to be before the camera, that was all.”

The little Gish family had never lived in a house, always in an apartment: in the Brentwood Apartments, and in the La Belle. But in the autumn of 1915, they leased Denishawn, home of the dancer, Ruth St. Denis, fitted for a school, plainly furnished, with dancing-floor, horizontal bar and other equipment, all of which strongly appealed to Lillian, who had been studying with Miss St. Denis, and could continue her work there.

The owner had left the beginnings of a menagerie, which they completed. At Christmas time that year, most of Lillian’s friends gave her live things. A partial census shows an owl—one-eyed, gray—eight Japanese finches, two parakeets, love-birds, two or three canaries, one little poll-parrot; another, “John” (who, in 1932, still survives); also, squirrels, a pair of golden pheasants, and a pair of peacocks that Miss St. Denis had left.

They did not remain in Denishawn; the next paragraph explains why. Lillian to Nell:

We have moved from that huge house I told you about. We were there
eight months, and during the last four, we had four burglars. One
was so bold as to come in through the dining-room window, all the
way upstairs into Mother’s room, at the improper hour of 2:30 in
the morning.

Being an old house with many squeaks, Mother knew all about him
before he made his appearance, and greeted him with two bullets,
the first of which hit the ceiling (she would have been terrified
if she had hit _him_), and the second went through the railing in
the hall. However, the man ran away, and the police never did
catch him. All this time I was out on the sleeping-porch,
petrified—could not utter a sound or move an inch. Oh, I am very
brave. Imagine, Nell, being awakened from a sound sleep by your
Mother tearing through the house, shooting a gun.

So they went back to apartments, permanently, as they believed.

Mrs. Gish was not very well, and wanted only to have peace. She was something of a financier; her business experience partly accounted for that, though she was a natural economist.

“Your salaries,” she told Lillian and Dorothy, “are not income, but merely an exchange in money for your natural capital of youth and health. Salaries are capital, and all above actual needs should be invested as such. The returns you get from investment are income.”

Lillian and Dorothy were making very good salaries. The day of spectacular earnings had not yet arrived, but two hundred and fifty or three hundred dollars a week left a margin for banking. The little troupers who had received ten to fifteen dollars a week, and lived on less than half of it, began to feel themselves capitalists. This friend and that suggested wonderful “buys,” and exhibited dividend slips. Then the “olive grove” epidemic broke out. Everybody was investing in olive groves, certain that every ten dollar share of stock would be worth hundreds within a few years. Lillian considered this prospect, with prayer and palpitations. The beautiful gray-green olive groves were certainly very nice. She had a balance of three hundred dollars, and one day hesitantly subscribed for that amount of stock. The palpitations grew worse. Olive groves! Why, it would take ages, and there would be so many olives, nobody would buy them. Besides, Lillian found she needed the money. She went to the office of the olive growers, and stated her case. A stout, good-natured man there listened quietly, regarded her thoughtfully, and returned her investment. What an escape—the others did not get their money back, and to date, dividends are shy.

By and by, when the three hundred had grown to as many thousand, another epidemic was in the air. Oil! Everybody caught it, including Bobby Harron, who was terribly in love with Dorothy and anxious to make the whole Gish family rich. Mrs. Gish shook her head. There was a tract of land which she thought promising. Lillian took a look at it, and was unfavorably impressed. It was just dirt—unbeautiful with weeds, and depressing tin cans. Bobby’s oil stock looked valuable, and had an attractive name, something patriotic, like “Uncle Sam,” or “Union Jack.” There is a superstition that any such name is a hoodoo, but Lillian and Bobby did not know this—not then. When Bobby pulled out his next dividend, Lillian fell.

That was about all: dividends hesitated after that, finally forgot to arrive. The stock that she had bought around 60, was quoted around 3. Bobby said it would “stage a grand come-back,” but to date it has not done so. Bobby was a sweet soul, and they thought none the less of him. “John,” the Gish parrot, to whom they had vainly tried to teach some proper things to say, acquired for himself the disconsolate wail: “Oh, dear! Oh, dear! Oh, dear!”

“_Why_ do you suppose he does that?” Lillian asked Harry Carr, a Los Angeles newspaper man, of whom we are likely to hear again.

“That’s easy,” said Carr, “he is discussing oil stock.”

And the land? The dirt? Well, a lot of foolish people began to buy it and to cover up the weeds and things with houses, which made a lot of other foolish people want it, until its price increased ten, twenty, an-hundred-fold!

X

THE NIGHTMARE OF WAR

Griffith, in England, wrote that he had wanted to enlist, but was being urged by English officials, Lloyd George and others, to do a war picture as propaganda. He might send for Lillian, soon.

“Intolerance” had made a stir in London, and the war situation had made a stir in Griffith. Like his ancestors, he wanted to carry a gun—to go into the trenches and pull a trigger. Lord Beaverbrook said to him:

“That is nonsense. You can do a thousand times more for the cause by making a picture that will show the need of American intervention on the largest possible scale.”

Griffith already had a story in mind—one he had planned on a night when he had been reading of the German desolation of Belgium and the French frontier.

“We will help you,” Lloyd George and other high officials told him. “We will give you the use of our soldiers and training camps; we will put you on the front lines in France.”

Griffith was ever a wary person. Never one to close a door behind him ... to make an irrevocable decision, to fire until charged and primed. He wrote Lillian that he was looking for a location in Paris, guardedly adding that he would not begin work until the war ended. On the strength of which, Lillian, by this time in New York, paid a brief, happy visit to Nell, then living on the “Blue Dog Houseboat,” at Miami.

Two weeks later, with her mother, she was on her way across the Atlantic. In eight days they were in Liverpool where they sat down to wait for Dorothy. It was not decided when they sailed that Dorothy was to have a part in the new picture.

Dorothy sailed May 28. With her was Bobby Harron; also, Griffith’s faithful camera man, Gottlieb Wilhelm Bitzer, a terrible name to carry into England and France. The ship was the _Baltic_—General Pershing and staff aboard.

“Tell me,” Pershing said to Dorothy, “how one can learn to face calmly a moving-picture camera.” Everyone is afraid of something.

The _Baltic_ zigzagged across the ocean in thirteen days. Lillian and her mother became frantic, waiting. Dorothy, arriving, was shocked at her mother’s appearance. Her face was haggard with anxiety. Then, presently, they were on their way to London.

It was the first time any of them had been abroad. England in June: the tiny fields, the trim hedges, the stately trees, the thatched villages—picture-book land. At London they went directly to the Savoy Hotel, and were given a room on the Embankment, overlooking the Thames. Little did they guess what they were to see from those windows. All seemed quiet enough. They did some sight-seeing.

A few days later, they had a call from a post-office official, concerning a package from America. A courteous man, they asked him about the raids, on London. There would be no more, he said. The Zeppelins had proved easy targets, the Germans would not send them again. And he added: “Don’t mind if you should hear gun-fire at eleven o’clock; that will be our anti-aircraft gun practice.”

Barely were the words out of his mouth, when there came a far-off boom from the eastward. He looked at his watch. “Very extr’ord’nary,” he said, “they are beginning the practice half-an-hour ahead of time.” A moment later, he was gone.

The firing kept up. Lillian and Dorothy ran down the corridor, to a balcony. A waiter, passing, told them that the East End was being raided. He let them look through his binoculars. High in the air, to the eastward, one could make out a small, black speck—eighteen thousand feet up, he said.

They hurried down and got into a taxi, to see the raid. On the way to Whitechapel, they came to a post-office which had been struck. A corner of it was blown off—a number of persons killed. A great crowd had collected. They were told that much greater damage had been done in Whitechapel. They found there a schoolhouse, where ninety-six children had been killed. Crazed mothers swarmed about, looking for fragments of their dead.

Other bombs had fallen in the neighborhood. People were insane from grief. A schoolmaster carried out his own child. A woman standing near had just discovered that her boy was among the victims. Her face was distorted—it was as if someone had pulled it out of shape.

XI

UNDER FIRE

With the one thought of getting out of London, Mary Gish and her daughters went to Cambridge. But Cambridge, too, had been raided. At night, streets and houses were pitch dark. No anti-aircraft guns. No protection of any sort.

Two nights satisfied them. They returned to London, where for ten days it was quiet enough. Then, one morning, Mrs. Gish, Lillian and Dorothy, were awakened from sound sleep by a terrific explosion. They ran to the windows. Coming up the Thames, in perfect formation, were twenty German planes, flying in what seemed a slow and majestic manner, dropping bombs as they came. They were so low that one could distinguish the crosses on the under side of their wings. Mrs. Gish and her daughters watched them, fascinated.

Were they afraid? Undoubtedly they were: with death hovering in the air, likely to come plunging down at any moment, not many of the race—a race blessed, or cursed, with imagination—could be wholly indifferent. The rest of the party—Griffith, Bobby Harron and Gottlieb Wilhelm Bitzer—came crashing in.

They supposed the planes would drop bombs on Waterloo Station, and especially on the Hotel Cecil, headquarters of the English Flying Corps, its roof covered with anti-aircraft guns. The Cecil was near them—next door. Nothing of the kind happened. The German planes, undisturbed by the shells fired at them, circled slowly around the Houses of Parliament, without dropping a bomb; then, turning, left London. This was on Saturday, July 8, 1917. The papers next morning reported thirty-seven dead, one hundred and forty-one wounded—numbers probably minimized. The Griffith party was shaken, dazed. It seemed incredible that in a world supposedly civilized such things could happen.

There was no longer any rest. Raids came at night, and in relays. One followed another—two and three in one night. They were meant to break the English morale.

The first night raid was by glorious moonlight. Mrs. Gish, Lillian and Dorothy, sitting in their apartment about ten, heard a distant booming, then a far-off voice calling: “Take cover—take cover!” They merely sat there, while the bombing came closer and closer, with aircraft guns going. By and by it was over. Next morning, they heard that less damage had been done than before, but enough.

About two nights later, as the girls stood in front of a dressing-table, in their nightgowns—Mrs. Gish already in bed—there came from just under their windows such an explosion as could not be described in words. The electric lights in the bathroom went out—windows were shattered. They rushed into the hall. All on that floor were there, in wild confusion. They called to one another that the hotel had been struck. Then, from outside, came a man’s scream. They had never realized how terrible a man’s scream could be. Cries and groans followed. They stared their inquiry into one another’s faces.

The bomb, they learned, had struck just by Cleopatra’s Needle, a few yards distant. It had hit a tram and killed eleven persons, wounding many others. The conductor had had his legs blown off. It was he who had screamed, no doubt. Other bombs had fallen nearby. One on the little Theatre on Adelphi Terrace; another at the Piccadilly Circus; still another by Charing Cross Hospital. They had heard none of these, because of the concussion in their ears from the one that had fallen beneath their windows.

Lillian and Dorothy crept into one bed, shaking, unable to sleep. At four they got up, dressed, saw the dawn breaking over London—workmen going to their jobs. On the street, they found that many windows had been blown from shops, the glass so finely shattered that it was like snow. The girls said little, but listened to the comments of the working people—comments not pleasant to hear.

The raids now came regularly. The nights became hideous nightmares. Lillian and her mother seemed to get their nerve back. When the raids came, they would take their pillows and go into their little foyer, to try to get away from the noise. Dorothy took her pillow, too, but she did not sit on it—she hugged it. Finally, it was September. They had been there three months!

“... You cannot imagine, Nell, what terrible things those big things in the sky are, dropping death wherever they go. If this war would only end.... I am still here, and will live to see you and Tom and the babies again, in spite of it. So don’t worry.”

Lillian went out a good deal, and, as was her habit, made a study of the people ... to see how they acted under the stress and agony of war. She went to the Waterloo Station, to watch them saying good-bye. Always she was watching ... on the street ... everywhere.

XII

FRANCE

Days ... nights ... they seemed to have passed out of any world they had ever known, into a sinister, topsy-turvy world, where murder and destruction ruled.

Griffith down on the Salisbury plain, where there were great camps, was already making portions of the picture. Returning, at last, to London he escorted his little party down to Southampton, to take boat for France. It was a transport, crowded with soldiers. Mrs. Gish and the girls were in one tiny room, two in one bunk. Twice they started, and were sent back because of floating mines. Finally they were at Havre, and next evening at Paris, at the Grand Hotel.

Paris was dark—a place where almost anything could happen—but Griffith and the girls somehow managed to grope their way about, to the river and elsewhere. By daylight they did some shopping.

Griffith got the papers that would permit them to go to the fighting area; then, one morning, with Mrs. Gish, Lillian and Dorothy, and Bobby Harron, set out in an automobile, passed through the gates of Paris. In an article for a home paper, Lillian described their journey:

Paris still has gates, just as you read about in the romantic
novels. There is a particular gate that leads to the war zone and
not a single, solitary human being can go through it unless he is
a soldier, or one who has business in the zone.

Can you imagine how important you feel when you go through that
gate? You find it very hard to believe that you are not just
acting in a “movie,” in a Los Angeles background that Mr. Huck,
the man who builds the moving-picture sets, has built—the road and
everything.

And how you do go! By tall poplar trees, by long fields of France.
France! Why, the very name is a poem and a romantic novel, all by
itself. Lombardy poplars! It sounds like an old-fashioned song.

Through the fields are the long lines of barbed wire. That is
where the trenches are. The very trenches that used to defend
Paris. Then, after fifteen minutes’ ride, you are where the French
stood in defense of Paris.... This is where the Germans were. They
came this far. This very road ... these very trenches are where
the men were.

But now you see the first town that the Germans bombed. You come
to the same kind of houses, blown all to pieces, wreck and ruin
everywhere. In one second-story, there was part of a bedstead
still left, and pieces of bed-clothes, that no one had taken the
trouble to pick up, after the French had come back. I can write
about it, and I can talk about it, and you can read about it,
until you are old and gray and sit in a rocking-chair, but you
could not understand it unless you saw it. Just streets, muddy and
deserted, and little graveyards of houses, hundreds of them.

You may not know it, but if you have been in one raid, or one
bombardment, where you hear the explosions coming closer and
closer, and you shake and shake and tremble and get sick at your
stomach, and dizzy, and lose your mind with fear, every moment,
you can imagine what it was to these people who had to endure it
for hours and days, and finally had their whole places blown away.

Were they running down the road we have been on, when this
happened? Sometimes they would not leave, because they did not
know where else to go. They could not believe it was true, anyhow,
and they stayed and stayed on.

The farther they went, the greater the desolation. They worked in Compiègne and Senlis, and anyone who visited that neighborhood, even as late as 1921, can form a dim idea of what it must have been in 1917. Ruin everywhere, broken homes; furniture in fragments, and scattered. Pieces of everything; clothing, little playthings, bits of lace, scraps of another existence.

To the eastward, the guns were always going. All that part of France was still subject to bombing raids. There were days when it was necessary to take refuge with a little French family, in a bomb cellar. Lillian wrote:

I have been in cellars myself, with a lot of other people around,
frightened to death, sitting close to Mama and Dorothy, who had
the shakes and whimpered as she used to when she was a baby,
because it was so terrible.

They learned a number of things: they learned to tell enemy planes, to know shrapnel by its gray drift of smoke. They did not remain long in that sector—only long enough to get the required pictures. Griffith went to the front line, and made trench scenes—in the line itself. Then directly they were all back in London, in the raids again. Apparently they had not stopped ... they would never stop.

One night when the planes had been over three times, the noise was so terrific that Dorothy suggested they go down into one of the ballrooms. They found English officers and ladies strolling about, calm in their English way, apparently not greatly concerned by the raid which was still going on. Dorothy, nervously watching, saw a lovely girl about her own age, come in. They looked at each other, at first without speaking. Then the girl said:

“You are an American, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“So am I,” and they fell into each other’s arms.

They spoke of the horrors of the raids—of the one then going on. Finally, Dorothy said:

“One thing I’m thankful for, I’m soon going back home, and will get away from all this.”

The girl’s eyes grew big. She said:

“You are going back! And you are not afraid?”

“Afraid? After all this? At least, if one is hit by a torpedo, it’s direct, and sure, and soon ended. In a raid like this, you never know.”

But the girl said:

“I can never imagine crossing the water again.”

“Why?”

“I was on the _Lusitania_, coming to England with a chaperon, to meet my fiancé. I clung to a deck-chair for four hours. My chaperon was drowned right beside me.”

Dorothy, telling of it afterwards, said:

“I did not know her name—I do not know it now. She never knew mine. She had a look in her eyes she will carry the rest of her days.”

XIII

“HEARTS OF THE WORLD”

October found them safely home. After all their wish to get there, America seemed a poor place: uninteresting, flat, tepid, futile—its people had little idea of what was going on, “over there.” No wonder the returning soldiers could not settle down to a humdrum life of work. It was a thing next to impossible.

Mary Gish and her daughters found their nerves on a tension. Blasting in the street made them jump. The strain had been terrible. Mrs. Gish had lost thirty-five pounds—she would never be quite the same again. Dorothy, by her own statement, had lost ten pounds. “Lillian is brave; besides, she couldn’t afford to lose. She gained a whole pound.” Lillian had no desire to go back, yet was sorry it was all over. Sometimes, looking back, it seemed to her that she had been dreaming.

“Hearts of the World” was shown for a tryout at Pomona, California, on Monday, March 11, 1918, and during the rest of the week at Clune’s Auditorium, Los Angeles.

Both Lillian and Dorothy had studied and worked very hard for this picture, and it had been obtained at the risk of their mother’s life and their own. It deserved success, and it had it. Lillian, as the heroine of the story, captured and mistreated, gave a beautiful and pathetic presentation of her part. Dorothy, “the Little Disturber,” a strolling singer, had a rôle suited to her gifts. A lute under her arm, she romped through the war scenes with a jaunty swagger, which, set to music, was irresistible. A London street-girl had provided the original. Lillian discovered her one day, and followed her about, to copy her artistic points. Bobby Harron was the hero-lover of the story—a very good story, on the whole—though it was the ravage and desolation of war that was the picture’s chief value.

On April 4, “Hearts of the World” was presented at the 44th Street Theatre, before an invited audience. When, on the following evening, the theatre was opened to the public, seats sold by speculators brought as high as five and ten dollars. There were long runs everywhere. In Pittsburgh, the picture broke all records for any theatrical attraction in that city.

* * * * *

The writer of these chapters saw the film at this time, and again, with Lillian, in 1931. A good deal of it was remembered vividly enough. It had been the first World War picture, and it remained one of the best. The trench fighting was terribly realistic. There were scenes taken on the field that were war itself. Always, the action is swift. Toward the end of the picture, where Lillian and Bobby are defending themselves against a German assault, it becomes fairly breathless.

Throughout, the picture has a tender quality, in spite of its cruel setting. But there are exceptions to this, one especially: Lillian in the hands of a German, whipped because she cannot handle a big basket of potatoes.

“Did the beating hurt?” I asked.

“Terribly. I was padded, but not nearly enough. My back bore the marks for weeks. Mother was fearfully wrought up over it.”

She approved the picture, as a whole. Thought it better than many of those made today. She was not far wrong. There was more sincerity of intention—more earnest work. At one place, the heroine, through the shock and agony of war, becomes mentally unhinged. Lillian’s portrayal of the gradual approach of this broken condition was as fascinating as it was sorrowful.

XIV

“BROKEN BLOSSOMS”

Lillian was entering a period of super-effort and success. Effort, especially—at first. The indefatigable and relentless Griffith kept them going, night and day. Hardly had he launched one war picture till he made another. He had much war film left, and he built another story around it. Two, in fact, though the second came somewhat later. While in England, Queen Alexandra and a number of titled women had lent themselves to the cause, by posing in arranged groups before the Griffith cameras. In “The Great Love,” these films were used. “The Romance of a Happy Valley,” and “True Heart Suzie” followed, idyllic countryside pictures, with Lillian in tender comedy parts.

Griffith no longer directed her—not really. “I gave her an outline of what I hoped to accomplish, and let her work it out her own way. When she got it, she had something of her own. Of course, she was imitated. A dozen actresses would copy whatever she did. They even got themselves up to look like her. She had to change her methods.”

What a joy to work for Griffith! At night, in bed, you thought out your part, and mentally rehearsed it—over and over. Then, next day, you tried it, and when at last it was “shot,” you eagerly looked, a day or two later, for the “rushes,” to see what you had done. Sometimes it was pretty bad—not at all what you had expected. Never mind, that was the advantage of playing for the pictures: you could see yourself, and correct your mistakes. You could do it over and over—Griffith was never stingy with film. He nearly always made twenty times what he used. He would let you try, and keep trying, until both you and he were satisfied. He knew that you had studied the lights, and angles, and groupings—that you had something definite in mind. Often, he consulted you—sometimes let you direct a scene.

* * * * *

It was during the summer of 1912 that Lillian had begun work with Griffith, at the old Biograph studio on Fourteenth Street. Now, almost exactly seven years later, she arrived at what may be called the crest of her film career. Not suddenly: she had been climbing steadily, working like a road-builder, almost from the first day. Now she had reached the top, that was all.

In an article for the _Ladies’ Home Journal_ (Sept., 1925) she said:

When anyone asks me to pick out from the many I have been in, the
picture I like best, I answer without much hesitation, and without
much thought, “Broken Blossoms.” I say this not because the
picture was an artistic picture, which it was. I say this not
because it was a compelling or tragic story with no clearing-away,
no laying of tracks, no getting ready for the tragedy—it was
exactly all this; but because the picture was quickly and smoothly
accomplished. It took only eighteen days to film.

She does not say that it was her most notable characterization, and in the broader sense, it may not rank with some of her later work: with Mimi, for instance, in “La Bohême”; with Hester Prynne, in “The Scarlet Letter.” Nevertheless, it is the film rôle for which she will be longest remembered, the part that for artistic conception and delineation and sheer beauty has not been surpassed, either by herself, or by any other. To this day, the magazines reproduce flashes from the now immortal closet scene of “Broken Blossoms,” as the “highest example of screen realism.”

“Broken Blossoms,” a poetic tragedy of the Chinese slums of London, was a film adaptation of “The Chink and the Child,” from Thomas Burke’s collection entitled “Limehouse Nights.” Griffith and Lillian recognized its possibilities, and what she could make of the part of the “Child.” She at first thought the part too young for her, but agreed to try it.

The story is that of a brutal father, a pugilist, who beats and browbeats his twelve-year-old daughter until she has become a terrified, trembling little creature, a stunted human semblance, with a pathetically lovely face. A young Chinese, drift of the quarter, out of pity and adoration for her loveliness, one day gives her shelter, when, after a beating, she staggers into his poor shop. The ending involves the tragic death of all of them, the final scene being one of exquisite art. This is Griffith’s version, but the character of Lucy Burrows is the same in both. This bit is from Burke’s story:

... always in her step and in her look was expectation of dread
things; ... yet for all the starved face and transfixed air, there
was a lurking beauty about her, a something that called you in the
soft curve of her cheek, that cried for kisses and was fed with
blows, and in the splendid mournfulness that grew in eyes and
lips.

In the world of drama, there are rôles which the competent artist “creates”—well, or less well—and makes his own; there are rôles—oh, rarely enough—which are his from the beginning, created _for_ him: “Disraeli,” for George Arliss—“The Music Master,” for David Warfield. I have told my story very badly if the reader does not recognize that for Lillian Gish, the character of Lucy Burrows offered such a part: a part such as would not come to her during more than another ten years, and then, not for the screen.

* * * * *

To a young man named Richard Barthelmess, lately a graduate of Columbia College, Griffith gave the part of the “Chinaman,” because he was rather small, very good-looking, with a face that could make up “Chinese.” To Donald Crisp, an Englishman (he had been General Grant in “The Birth of a Nation”), he gave the part of Battling Burrows. Crisp was a realistic person, and had a face that in full war-paint was a thing to put fear into the stoutest heart.

Lillian was just over the influenza—not equal to the strenuous Griffith rehearsing. Carol Dempster, who had been a dancer in “Intolerance,” rehearsed the part under his direction. Lillian rehearsed with Barthelmess, earning his gratitude.

“It was my first important picture,” Barthelmess said recently, “and I was anxious to do it well. Lillian had had six or seven years’ experience, and she was the soul of patience.” Reflectively, he added: “Lillian, Dorothy, and Mary Pickford are the three finest technicians of the screen. I learned more from Lillian than from any other person, except Griffith.”

The labor of production began. Lillian had been promised that she could work short hours, with nine hours each night for sleep. But of course, Griffith could not stick to that. He could not keep away from the studio; nor could the others.

It was during this strenuous period that Lillian evolved what Griffith calls “the one original bit of business that has been introduced into the art of screen acting.” In his ghastly preparation for beating Lucy, Battling Burrows pauses, and commands her to smile. Griffith and Lillian had discussed how this could be done most effectively. Then, in the midst of the scene, Lillian had an inspiration: Lifting her hand, she spread her fingers and pushed up the corners of her mouth. The effect was tremendous. “Do that again!” shouted Griffith, and they repeated the scene until they got that heart-wringing bit of technique to suit them. Griffith couldn’t get over it.

Another classic bit is where the cringing Lucy, to arrest her father’s hand, looks up in an agony of pleading terror:

“Daddy, your shoes are dusty!” And flings herself forward to clean them.

The closet scene was the climax—the terrible moment where Lucy’s father is breaking in, to kill her. Nobody could rehearse that for her. For three days and nights, she rehearsed it almost without sleep. Small wonder, then, that the hysterical terror of the child’s face was scarcely acting at all, but reality. It is said that when the scene was “shot,” there was an assemblage of silent, listening people outside the studio, awe-struck by Lillian’s screams. Griffith, throughout the scene, sat staring, saying not a word. Her face, during the final assault and struggle, became a veritable whirling medley of terror, its flashing glimpses of agony beyond anything ever shown before or since on the screen. When it was ended, Griffith was as white as paper.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were going to do that?” he asked, shakily.

“What impressed us all,” writes Harry Carr (he had become Griffith’s assistant), “was that all her reactions were those of a child. Her wild terror in the closet scene—the finest example of emotional hysteria in the history of the screen—was the terror of a child.” Carr further remembers that she had been to several hospitals, to study hysteria, and to inquire how one would be likely to die, from beating.

* * * * *

Griffith was not quite sure what to do with “Broken Blossoms.” He believed it a great artistic success, but it was unusual, tragic: It might win great and instant approval; it might be an utter failure. Harry Carr and Arthur Ryal, the latter a well-known press agent, urged him to take it to New York. Griffith agreed, and took everybody with him. Morris Gest, who saw it at a private showing, “went quite mad” over it: “Greatest picture the world has ever seen—charge what you please for it. You can pack the house at any cost.” They agreed that two and three dollars would be the proper figure.

XV

“I WORK SUCH LONG HOURS”

“Broken Blossoms” was first shown as the initial offering of Griffith’s “repertory season” at the George M. Cohan Theatre, New York, May 13, 1919, before as distinguished an audience as had ever assembled in a Broadway theatre. There was not a hitch anywhere. The film was mechanically perfect; it was accompanied by special haunting music. The Chinese scenes showed an effect of pale blue lighting. Griffith, Lillian and Barthelmess were present. When the picture ended, its success assured, Morris Gest darted back stage, kicked over chairs, waved his arms, wept and laughed hysterically. The Sun, next evening, called it the “most artistic photoplay yet produced.” The Tribune said: “_It is the most beautiful_ motion picture we have ever seen, or ever expect to see. When it was over, we wanted to rush up to everyone we met and cry: ‘Oh, don’t miss it, don’t miss it!’” There was a great deal more in the same strain, echoed by every critic. The elder Schildkraut said of it: “I have seen every actress of Europe and America during the last half century. Lillian Gish’s scene in the closet, where she is hiding in terror from her brutal father, is the finest work I have ever witnessed.”

* * * * *

And Lillian: if she had been no more than widely popular before, she was indubitably famous now. All day long, reporters and photographers waited outside her rooms at the Commodore. Invitations piled on her table. What a commotion!

“Life,” she wrote Nell, “is just one long photograph and interview.” Was she all they said? “Queen of the Silent Drama”? “Duse and Bernhardt of the Screen”? How could anyone be both? And why must she be anybody but herself? Still, it was rather fun to have them say those things; gratifying, too. Was she the little girl who such a brief while ago had lost her little telescope bag, running for a train, and slept on the station benches—tired, so tired?

She was tired, now. And there seemed no resting place. Almost immediately back in Los Angeles, she was writing Nell:

“I work such long hours. Sometimes I don’t even see Mother for days. Can you imagine us living in the same house and hardly seeing one another?

“I must go to the studio, now, to have what I hope will be my last interview for years. I certainly was not made to be famous, it is beginning to get on my nerves.”

Somewhat later, she wrote:

Nell, we don’t belong to that set where they think they buy
happiness with dollars. I think that is why I didn’t like New
York, this time—though of course I shouldn’t say that, as they
were wonderful to me, both the press and the people....

The studio gave a party for Mr. Griffith, Saturday night; all the
stage-hands, electricians and working men, their wives and
families, and of course the actors, and such. It reminded me of
Massillon—was just such a party as we would have there—bright
studio, all decorated with lanterns, and music playing, dancing,
sandwiches, _baked beans_, ice-cream.... Madam (the colored lady
who cleans the place) sang and danced. Dick, Dorothy and Bobby
acted the fool—it was just a foolish party.

Her taste was for her friends, her work—the simple, daily round. Did she sometimes stop to look back over the way she had come, and along a royal road that stretched before? I think not often. She was not a dreamer in that sense. When fan letters praised her to the skies, when the newspapers labeled her “The World’s Darling,” she was pleased, no doubt, but kept her balance; and sometimes, about three in the morning, she found it no trouble to remember that “the world’s darling” was just a frail, little figure, huddled in the dark, trying to get to sleep.

XVI

DIRECTOR LILLIAN

Griffith now took an important step. He removed himself and his players from California to New York, really to Mamaroneck, on Long Island Sound, where he had leased the old Flagler mansion and grounds, and contracted for a studio, soon to be completed. The mansion itself would serve for the executive offices, possibly for occasional scenes of grandeur. Lillian and her mother made the transcontinental journey with Harry Carr, now Griffith’s right-hand man. Their train passed through Massillon, but at lightning speed. Carr remembers that all the way across the country, Lillian looked forward to this splendid moment, and though very late, refused to go to bed until it had passed.

She was greatly excited, and kept trying to point out things to
me, though you couldn’t see anything but the ticket office. I was
impressed by how much of the child she had.

Lillian, with her mother and Dorothy, established themselves at the Hotel Commodore, to be handy to the Grand Central Station, and thus within thirty minutes of Mamaroneck. It was costly, and sometimes they planned to have a farm near the studio: “five acres, with pigs, cows, chickens, horses.” At least, it was something to dream about, for Spring.

Griffith, having got his new studio about ready, conceived the notion of making two pictures in Florida, neither of them with a part for Lillian—a great disappointment, for Nell still lived on the Blue Dog houseboat, at Miami.

However, there were compensations: Griffith wanted a picture made in his absence, and agreed to let Lillian direct it. To direct had been her ambition.

“I have changed my career,” she wrote Nell, “—am a director; yes, am directing Dorothy’s next picture; will start Friday—have the story all rehearsed, and will start taking, then.”

They had done the story themselves, she and Dorothy. It had been partly inspired by a piece of “business” that Dorothy had found in a comic magazine: A husband had complained to his wife that she wore such dowdy clothes, no one would notice her on the street. When they went out again, the wife walked a few steps ahead and made faces at every man she met, with the result that all looked at her, much interested.

“We decided to make a picture around that situation”—Lillian telling the story—“and call it ‘She Made Him Behave.’ We were always looking for picture possibilities—particularly for leading men. James Rennie was at the moment in New York, disengaged, and was very glad to get the part—his first picture. When I first proposed directing a picture for Dorothy, Griffith said: ‘Why do you want to break up your happy home?’ meaning that Dorothy and I would fall out over it. We took the chance, and he went away and left us.”