Loe raamatut: «Life and Lillian Gish», lehekülg 10

XVI
DIRECTOR LILLIAN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“He went away and left us!” She was barely twenty-three. However well-versed she was in the technique of picture-making, she had never directed an entire picture. She was taking over a new and untried studio; she was assuming the responsibility of spending what was at least a modest fortune. Moreover, Griffith had never seen the script of the picture, for with Harry Carr to help, they made many incidents and scenes as they went along. The fact that Griffith was content to go away and leave the venture in her hands, implies two things: First, that his confidence in Lillian was large; second, that the motion-picture business is conducted on less rigid lines than other important enterprises. Both conclusions are warranted: Griffith did know Lillian, and the motion-picture industry is conducted like no other business on earth.

To begin with, it is not really a business at all—not merchandising. You are not buying something which you are to sell again. You are creating something—painting a canvas, doing it with human beings. Your accessories are mechanical, but even here, the personal element is a chief factor—the enthusiasm and good-will of the photographers, the electricians, the stage-hands. Griffith believed that Lillian could shape these to her taste. On the set, they were her friends. She called them by their intimate studio names: “Slim,” “Whitey,” “Joe,” and so on, and never left a set that she did not go to each one, and in her grave, dignified little way, thank him for the help he had been to her.

But let Lillian continue:

“I believed that no director had brought out Dorothy’s sweetness, especially her comic sense. I believed I could do it. Of course, I had been in pictures a number of years, and knew something about directing, but nothing at all of practical mechanics. I knew nothing of the measurements for a set, and was afraid the company would lose respect for me if they found it out. I went home and paced the floor of my room, measuring the number of feet, to try to get some idea of what I wanted to talk about when I got back to the studio. As a result, I ordered a room that was too big for the height of it. The camera couldn’t get far enough away, without shooting over the back wall. The camera-man, who had come from the war with a case of shell-shock, would walk up and down and throw his hat on the floor, and declare he couldn’t stand it. But he was really very kind, and we learned something every day.

“But then the worst developed. Mr. Griffith had bought an engine to transform alternating to direct current, and when we were ready to shoot the picture, we didn’t have enough ‘juice’ for the lights. We had to put a wire all the way from Mamaroneck, on poles, a costly job. Still it wouldn’t do. We were promised the power, but we didn’t get it. Sunday was my big day. Our picture had a wedding party, and I could get extras from Mamaroneck, thirty or forty of them, at two dollars a day; then, when we were ready, our lights failed us. It would be six o’clock in the evening before we could do anything. Perhaps not even then.”

Desperate as was the situation, she appears never to have lost her nerve. In a letter from Harry Carr, always present, we gather that her mechanical assistants were most concerned.

The kindness she had shown to the rough-necks came ripe. They almost worked themselves to the bone for her. When anything went wrong, they looked ready to faint in a body. Lillian would sit hour after hour, alongside the camera, waiting for the lights to come on. One day she sat there uncomplainingly, from nine o’clock in the morning until eleven at night, without a flicker of light.

Uncomplainingly, but what must have been going on inside. There was a small studio in New Rochelle, the Fischer studio. It was a poor thing, but at least there were lights. The Mamaroneck electric people promised that if she would work there a few days, everything would be all right when she got back. So they carted themselves and their sets to New Rochelle, and began again.

“It was certainly a poor place,” Lillian remembered; “Damp, the cellar full of water, no heat, and being late November and into December, it was very cold. Often, the actors had to hold their breath so it wouldn’t photograph. The next Sunday we all moved back to Mamaroneck. The lights, they told us, were all right, but that was a mistake. Back we went to the Fischer studio. In all, we moved back and forth three times. I very nearly lost my mind.

“Of course, I was responsible, and spending money—oh, by the thousands. Mr. Epping, our business manager, every night brought me the items of what we had spent that day. I am not much at figures, but I could read the total, which was not cheerful. But everybody stood by me, the ‘boys,’ as we then called the electricians and property men, especially. The actors, too—everybody.

“The last day’s work had to be done on Fifth Avenue, New York. It happened to come on the day before Christmas, and I didn’t want to postpone it. We engaged a bus, from which Dorothy had to look down and see her ‘husband’ ride by in a cab with another woman. To work on the street without a permit laid us open to arrest and fine, with a good chance of spending Christmas in jail. To get a permit would take time, which we could not afford. ‘Will you take a chance?’ I asked those who were going to do the scene. They agreed that they would, but things had a dubious look.

“Nevertheless, we got our bus and our taxicab, and started. I was on the bus with the camera-man—George Hill, now a famous director—Dorothy at the other end, the taxi just below. We had not gone a block when an enormous policeman started over, to see what it was all about. Then he took a good look at me and stopped, placed his fingers at the corners of his mouth and ‘put up’ a smile.

“You remember the scene in ‘Broken Blossoms,’ where the brutal father commands his terrified daughter to smile. I knew right away the big policeman had seen it. He really smiled, then, and so did I. ‘Oh, it’s you, is it?’ he said. ‘Yes, and this is my sister, Dorothy, and we’re trying to finish a picture before Christmas.’ ‘Go right on,’ he said. Farther up the Avenue, another policeman called out: ‘What do you think you’re doing up there?’ I put up the smile myself, that time, hoping he had seen the picture. Evidently he had, for he laughed and waved us along. I thought it safer not to break any new ground, so we turned and made the circuit. We made it several times, and were not troubled again, but helped.

“That night we knew we were done, and everybody was so happy, and so sorry, weeping on one another’s shoulders. By the time Mr. Griffith came home, our picture was nearly all cut, and ready. When he saw and approved of it, I was very happy, but it had nearly killed me.”

Lillian decided that directing was not for women. “Remodeling a Husband,” as the picture was finally called, turned out a financial success. She had spent fifty-eight thousand dollars, and twenty-eight days, making it, but it netted a profit of a hundred and sixty thousand dollars, and doubled Dorothy’s picture value. She was proud of all that, but did not care to try it again. A little while ago David Wark Griffith said:

“Lillian directed Dorothy in the best picture Dorothy ever made. I knew she could do it, for whenever we were making a picture I realized that she knew as much about it as I did—gave me valuable ideas about lights, angles, color, and a hundred things. She had brains, and used them, and she did not lose her head. You see what confidence I had in her to go off to Florida and leave her to direct a picture in a new studio, with all the problems of lights and sets, and a thousand other things a director has to contend with. I know how her lights failed on her, and all the complications that came up, and how she handled them, and how, out of it, she got that fine picture. One of the best. She didn’t tell me, but Carr did.”

XVII
“WAY DOWN EAST”

Griffith now began work on his greatest melodrama. “Way Down East” had been successful as a book and a play, and was precisely the sort of thing he could do best. From William A. Brady, for a large sum, he secured the picture rights, and plunged into production. There were to be two great outdoor scenes: a blizzard, in which the heroine, who has been inveigled into a mock marriage—and is, therefore, under the New England code, fallen and outcast—is lost; and the frozen river, which, blinded and desperate, she reaches, to be carried to the falls on a cake of ice. There was very little that was artificial about such scenes, in that day: the blizzard had to be a real one, the ice, real ice—most of it, at any rate. Griffith began rehearsing some scenes at Claridge’s Hotel, in New York, continuing steadily for eight weeks; but all the time there was an order that in case of a blizzard, night or day, all hands were to report at the Mamaroneck studio. Lillian had taken Stanford White’s house on Orienta Point. Reading the play, she knew it was going to be an endurance test, and went into training for it. Cold baths, walks in the cold against the wind, exercises … she had faith in her body being equal to any emergency, if prepared for it. In a magazine article, a few years later, she wrote:

The memorable day of March 6th arrived, and with it a snow-storm and a ninety-mile-an-hour gale. As I was living at Mamaroneck, near the studio, I quickly reported, and was made up as Anna Moore, ready but not eager for the work to be done. The scene to be taken was the one just after the irate Squire Bartlett turns Anna out of the house into the storm. Dazed and all but frozen, she wanders about through the snow, and finally to the river.

The Griffith studio was on a point or arm well out in Long Island Sound. The wind swept this narrow strip with great fury. The cameras had their backs to the gale. She had to face it.

She had been out only a short time when her face became caked with snow. Around her eyes this would melt—her lashes became small icicles. Griffith wanted this, and brought the cameras up close. Her lids were so heavy she could scarcely keep them open.

No need of spectacular “falls.” The difficulty was to keep her feet. She was beaten back, flung about like a toy. Her face became drawn and twisted, almost out of human semblance. When she could stand no more, and was half-unconscious, they would pull her back to the studio on a little sled and give her hot tea. A brief rest and back to the gale. Griffith had invested a large sum in the picture, and she must make good. One could not count on another blizzard that season. Harry Carr writes:

That blizzard scene in “Way Down East” was real. It was taken in the most God-awful blizzard I ever saw. Three men lay flat to hold the legs of each camera. I went out four times, in order to be a hero, but sneaked back suffocated and half dead. Lillian stuck out there in front of the cameras. D. W. would ask her if she could stand it, and she would nod. The icicles hung from her lashes, and her face was blue. When the last shot was made, they had to carry her to the studio.

A week or two later, they were at White River Junction. Vermont, for the ice scenes. Griffith took a good many of his company, and they put up at an old-fashioned hotel, a place of hospitality and good food.

White River Junction is at the confluence of the White and the Connecticut rivers. There is no fall there, but the current moves at the rate of six miles an hour, and the water is deep. The ice was from twelve to sixteen inches thick, and a good-sized piece of it made a fairly safe craft, but it was wet and slippery, and very cold. It was frozen solid when they arrived; had to be sawed and dynamited, to get pieces for the floating scene. Lillian conceived the idea of letting her hand and hair drag in the water. It was effective, but her hand became frosted; the chances of pneumonia increased. To the writer, recently, Richard Barthelmess, who had the star part opposite Lillian, said:

“Not once, but twenty times a day, for two weeks, Lillian floated down on a cake of ice, and I made my way to her, stepping from one cake to another, to rescue her. I had on a heavy fur coat, and if I had slipped, or if one of the cakes had cracked and let me through, my chances would not have been good. As for Lillian, why she did not get pneumonia, I still can’t understand. She has a wonderful constitution. Before we started, Griffith had us insured against accident, and sickness. Lillian, frail as she looked, was the only one of the company who passed one hundred percent perfect—condition and health.

“No accidents happened: The story that I missed a signal and did not reach Lillian in time, and that she came near going over the falls, would indicate that she made the float on the ice-cake but once. As I say, she made it numberless times, and there were no falls. Lillian was never nervous, and never afraid. I don’t think either of us thought of anything serious happening, though when I was carrying her, stepping from one ice-cake to another, we might easily have slipped in. I would not make that picture again for any money that a producer would be willing to pay for it.”

“ANNA MOORE”

At the end of the ice scene, there is an instant when the cake, at the brink of a fall, seems to start over, just as Barthelmess, carrying Lillian, steps from it to another, and another, half slipping in before he reaches the bank.

The critical moment at the brink of the fall was made in summer-time, at Winchell Smith’s farm, near Farmington, Connecticut. The ice-cakes here were painted blocks of wood, or boxes, and were attached to piano wire. There was a real fall of fifteen feet at this place, and once, a carpenter went over and was considerably damaged. In the picture, as shown, Niagara was blended into this fall, with startling effect.

Barthelmess remembers that Lillian kept mostly to herself. She took her work very seriously—too much so, in the opinion of her associates. But once there was a barn-dance at the hotel, in which she joined; and once she and Barthelmess drove over to Dartmouth College, not far distant, with Mr. and Mrs. Elmer Clifton, to a dinner given them by Barthelmess’s fraternity. After dinner, they heard a great tramp, tramp, and someone said to Lillian: “It’s the college boys, coming to kidnap you.” They sometimes did such things, for a lark.

But they only wanted to pay their respects. They gathered outside the window, which Mr. Clifton opened, and both Lillian and Barthelmess spoke to them through it.

The summer scenes of “Way Down East” were made at Farmington and at the Mamaroneck studio. Griffith had selected a fine cast, among them Lowell Sherman, the villain; Burr McIntosh, as Squire Bartlett; Kate Bruce, his wife; Mary Hay, their niece; and Vivia Ogden, the village gossip. The scene where Squire Bartlett drives Anna Moore from his home, was realistic in its harshness, and poor Burr McIntosh, a sweet soul who long before had played Taffy in “Trilby,” and who loved Lillian dearly, could never get over having been obliged to turn her out into the storm. Often, in after years, he begged her to forgive him.

A few minor incidents, connected with the making of “Way Down East,” may be recalled: Griffith had spent a great sum of money for the rights—$275,000, it is said—and was spending a great many more thousands producing it. He was naturally on a good deal of a tension. All were working to the limit of their strength, but they could not hold the pitch indefinitely. When Barthelmess, who is short, had to stand on a two-inch piece of board, to cope on terms of equality with Lowell Sherman, Sherman, who was a trained actor of the stage, could, and did, make invisible side remarks which made Barthelmess laugh. Whereupon, Griffith raged at the waste of time and film, and everybody was sorry, the villain penitent. “Stop that laughing! Turn around and face the camera,” were sharp admonitions perpetuated by a right-about-face in the picture to this day.

It was harsh in form, rather than by intention. They did not resent these scoldings. They believed in Griffith, knew something of his problems, wanted him to make good.

There was one scene during which Griffith had no word to offer—the scene in which Anna Moore (Lillian) baptizes her dying child. Harry Carr writes:

The only time I ever saw a stage-hand cry was in the baptism scene in “Way Down East.” It was made in a boxed-off corner, with only D. W., Lillian, the camera-man, a stage-hand and myself there. Everybody cried. It never made the same impression on the screen, because it was necessary to interrupt the action with the sub-titles. You saw her dripping the water on the baby’s head; then a sub-title flashed on, saying: “In the Name of the Father, etc.,” and the spell was broken.

Carr, Lillian and Griffith would sit far into the night, watching rushes from the scenes made the day before. It was a drowsy occupation—so many of the same thing—and after a day in the open, it was not surprising that Carr should nod. Across a misty plain of sleep, Griffith’s voice would come to him: “Which shot do you like best, Carr?”

It is noticeable in the baptism scene, that Lillian sits relaxed, her knees apart; that when she leaves the house, she walks with a dragging step, as one who had recently experienced the struggle and agonies of child-birth. It has been suggested that she had visited a maternity hospital for these details. When asked, she said:

“No, I did not do that. There was an old woman connected with the studio, who had borne a number of children. She told me all that I needed to know. I learned something, too, from pictures of the Madonna, by old masters. I noticed in all of them that the Madonna sat with her knees apart. I felt that there must be a good reason for painting her in that way.”

She had studied out every detail of the scenes she was to play. Many actors, even among the best, work by another method. They absorb the feeling of the plot, fling themselves into a scene, depending upon an angel to kindle the divine fire. This method never was Lillian’s. To her, the bush never of itself became a burning bush. She lit the fire and tended it. She knew the effect she wanted to produce, and found no research too tedious, no rehearsal too long—no effort too great, to achieve her end.

“Way Down East” was shown in October. Griffith, with Lillian and Barthelmess, were present in person, in the larger cities. It was like a triumphal tour. To present the “world’s darling” in scenes of actual danger, on the screen, and then have her appear in person, was to invite something in the nature of a riot. Reporters indulged in the most extravagant language. And there was a freshet of poetry, and of letters—love-letters, many of them, but letters, also, from persons distinctly worthwhile. David Belasco, whose “most beautiful blonde” verdict had long since gone into the discard, démodé, wrote:

Dear Lillian Gish,

It was a revelation to see the little girl who was with me only a few years ago, moving through the pictured version of “Way Down East” with such perfect acting. In this play, you reach the very highest point in action, charm and delightful expression. It made me happy, too, to see how you and your name appeal to the public.

Congratulations on a splendid piece of work, and good wishes for your continued success.

Faithfully,

David Belasco

John Barrymore went even further, when he wrote:

My dear Mr. Griffith:

I have for the second time seen your picture of “Way Down East.” Any personal praise of yourself or your genius regarding the picture I would naturally consider redundant and a little like carrying coals to Newcastle....

I have not the honor of knowing Miss Gish personally and I am afraid that any expression of feeling addressed to her she might consider impertinent. I merely wish to tell you that her performance seems to me to be the most superlatively exquisite and poignantly enchaining thing that I have ever seen in my life.

I remember seeing Duse in this country many years ago, when I imagine she must have been at the height of her powers—also Madame Bernhardt—and for sheer technical brilliancy and great emotional projection, done with an almost uncanny simplicity and sincerity of method, it is great fun and a great stimulant to see an American artist equal, if not surpass, the finest traditions of the theatre.

I wonder if you would be good enough to thank Miss Gish from all of us who are trying to do the best we know how in the theatre.

Believe me,

Yours very sincerely,

John Barrymore

Mrs. Gish, who was not a motion-picture enthusiast, made a single comment:

“Well, young lady,” she said, “you’ve set quite a high mark for yourself. How are you going to live up to it?”

THE RIVER SCENE IN “WAY DOWN EAST”

“Way Down East” was one of the most popular and profitable pictures ever made. Net returns from it ran into the millions. It has had several revivals, and at the present writing (Winter, 1931), is being shown at the Cameo Theatre, New York, “with sound.” Its day, however, is over. Taste has changed—has become what an older generation might regard as unduly sophisticated, depraved. This, with mechanical advancement—the talking feature, for instance—tells the story. A picture of even ten years ago—five years ago—is without a public.

“Way Down East” is a melodrama, but one that at moments rises to considerable heights. Putting aside the spectacular features of the picture—the blizzard and the ice-drift, where melodrama is raised to the nth degree—the scene where the villain reveals to his victim that their marriage was a mockery, the scene where Anna Moore, about to be turned out into the storm, denounces her betrayer, and the baptismal scene, already mentioned, are drama, and, as Lillian Gish gave them, worthy.

And, after all, what is, and is not, melodrama—and cheap. Cheap—because it is human. That is why we have invented for ourselves a hereafter—a place away from it all—of rest by green fields and running brooks. Very well, let us agree that the play was cheap, especially the comedy, which was low comedy and about the record in that direction. But if Lillian’s acting was cheap, and poor, then there is very little to be said for any acting, which, God knows, may be true enough, after all!