Chapter XV: 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.

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