Lillian Gish closed her eyes a moment as she recalled the shocking change in her mother's appearance as she lay helpless and motionless in London-an illness that had brought her gifted daughter from southern California in twelve days.
"That mother might live for. years a paralytic; that she might suddenly recover command of all her faculties, that anything might happen--these were the uncertainties outlined by the specialists we summoned," Miss Gish went on.
'" I stayed in London for a month. The delay and anxiety about her were assuaged a little by several incidents. One was the engrossing opportunity to watch the progress of England's great strike. It is in such situations that we who act have a chance to observe human nature with most of the masks laid aside.
"One had to respect the girls of England. They walked laughing, long distances to their daily tasks, and never complained. My admiration for the Briton in the throes -of war was re-inspired by the sight of his fortitude during that industrial cataclysm.
"The Asquiths, whom I had met through their son Anthony, recently returned to London from Hollywood, were very kind to me.
Margot, Countess of Oxford and Asquith, has that ineffable charm which endears her to all.
"I spent many delightful hours with her;
and Princess Bibesco, her daughter, extended herself to mitigate my worry over mother.
" One morning I was sitting beside mother's bed, when I was called to the telephone. A girl's voice said the speaker represented The People, a popular English weekly, and wanted to interview me. I asked her to come to tea.
" At four oíclock three of the most beautiful young girls I have ever seen were brought in.
They were exquisitely dressed, but plainly nervous, and their nails were quite black. I tried to put them at ease by interviewing myself; but they simply-sat and stared at me.
"Finally one confessed that they were not journalists at alt, but that she had arranged the fictitious interview so that she and her two friends could meet Lillian Gish.
" She was Lady Eleanor Smith, daughter of Lord Birkenhead, and her companions were similarly placed in the aristocracy.
They were such darlings, and they -explained that they had put ink on their fingers because they supposed all newspaper women dabbled with printer's ink!
" Late in May I brought mother back to America. We took her from the Savoy Hotel in London to Southampton in an ambulance, stayed ten days in New York City to break the trip, and then came to California.
"We had a private car, and filled it with tubs of ice with electric fans playing on them-to keep the car cool during the journey across the desert in June.
"We went to Mrs. Pickford's home on the beach at Santa Monica, until I was able to rent this house here on Adelaide Drive, where mother has been bedridden ever since.
" I began work at once in Annie Laurie, and it was finished last November. Every Scot in southern California came to help us. We had twenty-five special looms set up to make the plaids and tartans we needed in the big scenes.
" In a few days I shall start on my new picture, The Wind, from the novel of the same name by Dorothy Scarborough. It is the story of early western Texas and the effect of the ceaseless wind of the plains on the soul of one of the pioneer women. Mr. Seastrom, a great director, is directing it; and John Arnold has been selected ad the camera man.
"This is important, because a cameraman can mar a picture if he be incompetent or disposed to dislike the star or the director. And he can do it so skillfully that nobody could put a finger on the exact spot where he is wrecking the picture! It is largely a matter of lighting.
" LARS HANSON, who was in The Scarlet Letter, is the leading man in The Wind.
"I divide my time between the Metro studios and my mother's room overlooking Santa Monica Caiion. Dorothy has just finished making Madame
Pompadour in London with Antonio
Moreno and is on her way back to visit us.
"Because of my absence in England last year, my contract with Metro will run until August of this year.
"And that--that seems to be."
"Yes, that seems to end the story," I said. " Only one thing is lacking." "What is that?" "Love. I find no romance in your life
--the story of a man's love for a woman. Surely there must be some man who has loved you? " "Well," she said rather dryly, "if men have loved me, they have been remarkably successful in keeping it to themselves! "
"I think" I Said "that I have been fortunate in obtaining a real story, the true story of Lillian Gish, for the millions who have watched you on the screen for many years.
"The larger portrait is prepared, but there are a number of finer strokes I should like to put into the picture. Getting them merely involves a few reminiscences. If you will permit, Iíll suggest one or two topics.
" For example, whom do you regard as the greatest actor and the greatest actress in motion pictures?"
THAT is easy to answer: Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford. Chaplin is a consummate genius: in a few feet -of film he draws your laughter and your tears. And simplicity is the keynote of his art.
" Close behind him I would rank Wallace Beery. There is an actor about whom the world will hear much more forcibly before long.
He has the marvelous talent that can dispense with subtitles.
"Busy now with her immense fortune, her supremely happy .home, and her multitude of civic and charitable interests, Mary Pickford has far less time for the camera than the world wants and deserves. But she is by all odds the finest actress who has yet appeared on the screen.
" I might talk for hours on the matchless abilities of Mary and of Chaplin. I think it suffices merely to name them as the incomparable pair."
"I wonder if you'd be good enough simply to wander back down the trail of the years," I
attested. "Any opinion you express about members of your profession is of interest."
" I'm sorry, but I know very few people in the picture industry," Miss Gish replied. " Until I signed with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, I had worked for only two companies, Mr. Griffith's and Inspiration. My .plays were such that I could make few excursions outside my own groove.
" But there are one -or two incidents that happened within my own experience that may be interesting. For instance, did you ever
hear the story of the first kiss in moving pictures? John Emerson was responsible for it.
" He had come out of the old Fine Arts studio to direct Old Heidelberg, a picture in which Dorothy and Wallace Reid were starred. He noticed that they
merely placed their faces closely together where a kiss was called for.
"He stopped the camera and told them to kiss.
Dorothy refused. Emerson had come from the speaking stage, where a kiss
meant nothing; and he was dumfounded. He insisted that they touch lips. Dorothy began to cry, and they all went to one of the oldest members of the company, Frank (Daddy) Woods, the accepted arbiter of all our wrangles.
"Mrs. Reid was tremendously angry because Dorothy refused to kiss her husband, seeing in her obstinacy some sort of reflection on Wally's kissability.
"Emerson had his way at last Now a kiss means no more on the screen than on the stage,
"You may have looked often upon tae exquisitely beautiful face of Mary Astor, and possibly wondered how anything so perfect could exist. I am happy to say that I am partly responsible for her present prominence. It was when we first came out here that I noticed this lovely girl asking for a screen test.
" I whispered to her to stay on the set after Mr. Griffith went to luncheon, and then I made her up myself and made a test, using up a thousand feet of film, about
twenty times the length of the usual test. Mr. Griffith was furious and threatened to fire me.
But he gave her a part in the next picture.
"You may be surprised when I to you whom I regard as the greatest producer in our business. Douglas Fairbanks! I remember when he first came into the films.
"We had just arrived in Hollywood, that first company Mr. Griffith brought out here, when Fairbanks left the speaking stage and joined us. How hard he made the pictures seem to us!
"We were all so young and inexperienced, and every time a .splendid actor came fearlessly into the movies he raised the standard of acting just so much higher.
"It is amazing how Fairbanks has progressed. From an acrobatic sort of comedy acting he has advanced until one thinks of him now as a great producer rather than as an actor. He is the only producer who works by a chart.
"Everything is laid out in blocks and squares and colors and numbers. He says he can keep the thread of narrative running more coherently that way. At least, his big pictures are effective enough.
" BUT if those finished actors made things more difficult for us in the early days, they also were the means of enormously increasing our range of vision. Often their most valuable contribution to our stock of knowledge was in showing us what not to do in pictures, as well as what orthodox standards of acting would help to get the idea across.
"Two of the most instructive persons to watch at that time were Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree and Constance CoHier, who made Macbeth for John Emerson.
- ''Sir Herbert spoke the lines aloud as he went through the motions, and if he happened to forget the words everything stopped until somebody could run to his dressing-room and fetch him his part.
"Then he would practice his lines nod to Mr. Emerson and Billy Bitzer that he was ready for the camera.
"Douglas and Mary have a fine camp at Laguna Beach--fourteen little tents. I have been there often. There I met Gloria Swanson. even more charming in person than on the screen.
"Her husband, Marquis Henri de la Falaise et de la Coudray, is a real war hero. In his bathing-suit he presents a graphic picture of what modern warfare does to a man--he is so cut-and shot and covered with scars.
"Norma Talmadge is second to no one, in my esteem; but her sister Constance is far more vivacious and lively. No matter what the gathering is, the moment Constance enters the room it becomes a party.
"Not all phases of life in connection with -being what is generally described as a movie star are
pleasant. There are many annoyances.
" Not long ago a woman had me served with a summons because an automobile driver had run over her little girl: My connection with the affair was that three months earlier the driver had worked for me! 'The woman wanted fifty thousand dollars--but the case never even got into court.
"Another time somebody reported to me that twice, when I ,left my hairdresser's parlor, two suspicious men had followed me home. It was about the time that arrests were being made following the exposure of the plot to kidnap Mary Pickford.
"Chief of Detectives Mayor of Los Angeles assigned five plainclothes men to the case.
" I discharged my chauffeur, and one of the detectives became my driver. I was living then in a bungalow on the grounds of the Hollywood Hotel, and the other four detectives rented the cottages on either side of mine. They followed me every time I went out.
"Meanwhile they had told my maid and Miss Phyllis Moir, my secretary. Neither of them knew I was aware of the presence of the detectives, and I didn't know they knew about it. So for a whole month we three tried to keep from one another the fact that I was being shadowed night and day by five police officers.
"Every time I was about to leave in my car, the maid would lift the cage containing my canary out the window, which was the signal agreed on.
'"I wondered why they acted so strangely. We almost became hysterical when we found out how the complicated thing stood. However, nothing ever came of the suspected threat."
I watched Miss Gish begin work on her new picture, The Wind.
But that, as Kipling said, is another story. 'It would burst all reasonable biographical bounds of space to attempt to tell all that there takes place.
And it was my privilege several times to have luncheon with the star in her little dressing-room on the Metro lot. There are two small rooms, the first a sort of reception chamber and office for her secretary, Miss Moir.
It contains a couple of tables, a chair or two, a couch covered with soft cushions, and a closet concealed by sliding doors. This closet -holds 'numerous costumes and a shelf on which are stacked china and silverware. I do not know what the second room contains.
Come noon; I would walk with Miss Gish from the studio across the cropped lawns to the long, two-story frame building wherein are located all the dressing-room. It was like walking beside a vision of ethereal maidenhood as it was costumed in 1870.
Her yellow curls were gathered into little clusters against the nape of her slender neck; a light scarf caught about her exquisite shoulders revealed to the languorous California breezes by her low-cut bodice; her slim waist tightly encased in s corsage of red velvet; thin wrists whose whiteness was set off, as was the ivory of her throat, by narrow bands of pink velvet ribbon (the pink showing gray on the screen).; great billowy skirts of filmy, Rose-figured crinoline; her silken arms and little feet in their black suede slippers.
All this transformed Lillian Gish into a lovely, animated daguerreotype in delicate coloring that seemed to float near me over a velvet sward carpeting the ground between Chinese pagodas, pirate caves. Dutch windmills, desert palms, Western dance halls, Fifth Avenue mansions, Kafir kraals, and liquor-smuggling river craft-sets where other picture plays were being made, an exotic background in the modern setting of a strictly commercial undertaking.
And everybody spoke to her.
Our progress was ever interrupted by salutations. This man stopped to inquire about Mrs. Gish. That one to ask if the water-color models of her costume for the next scene had met her approval. Another to respond to her questions about his little sick daughter.
Women and children s11 waved or halted us while they said something to her or listened to something she had to say.
No other star in the great roster of Hollywood's constellation seems to command such genuine esteem, such unalloyed respect.
On the set, the electricians, the assistants, the woman at the little melodeon and the violinist who are ubiquitous in every 'studio, the carpenters--every man present vies with his companions in friendly rivalry to do something for her, to offer a glass of water, s chair between scenes, a wrap for her shoulders, a handkerchief to wipe from her cheeks and lashes the dust raised by the airplane propellers used in The Wind.
It was easy to assay this popularity: one had only to mention some other actress with whom these disillusioned,` expert, hard-boiled union men had worked, to perceive in what genuine regard Lillian Gish is held.
Arriving in her dressing-room, we would remove Miss Moir's typewriter and notebooks from a little table, place this in the center of the room, cover it with a blue checkered cloth; and while Miss Gish unpacked the wicker hamper her driver had fetched from her home I would stand on a chair and hand down the luncheon things from the shelf.
AN artichoke hollowed out and ''filled with diced carrots and tomatoes, a paprika-hued dressing, toasted bran muffins, a thermos warmed cup of tea--these ordinarily encompass -her midday menu. We would spread crepe napkins on our laps and help each other to the frugal repast.
In this restful recess from the tiresome repetitions of the sceneís in the studio--work that might begin at 7 o'clock in the morning
and continue until long past midnight --Miss Gish's relaxation never was complete until Miss Moir had brought; the latest bulletin from the nurse at Mrs. Gishís bedside.
Then Miss Gish would laugh and talk of many things.
"I have received such nice things from people good enough to like my pictures," she would say. "These eggshell cups, for instances; that delicate gray stationery; that fragile, spider-web fan-these were sent to me by Japanese who wrote such quaint letters with them.
"I shall always save some of these letters, so weirdly humorous are the things they do with the English language. Of course one can hardly even smile at them, they are so sincere."
As our meetings neared an end --I think it was probably at our last tea together in her dressing room--I thought of something that had lingered with me silence I had seen The Scarlet Letter. I had learned that one may speak openly with Lillian Gish on themes having to do with the art she has lifted to such pinnacles.
"Your life's motif," I said, "seems to be embraced in your constantly reiterated phrase -truth and beauty. But didn't you rather sacrifice the first when you tried to hide the little drawers in the lilac bush when the Puritan preacher came unexpectedly to where the Pilgrim mothers were doing the week's washing? "
Miss Gish laughed.
"Beauty is always truthful, even if truth sometimes is not
beautiful," she said. " I may have sacrificed truth, but I saved beauty; and the story of the sternhearted, remorseless Puritan era surely needed some such touches.
"The Pilgrim women did not wear so-to-speaks like those! Indeed, you may not know it, but they wore no such things at all: just long woolen stockings and many petticoats. I could not hang long woolen white things on the lilac bush and achieve any effect of beauty, a quality I regard as even more precious than mere truth.
" You'll never guess where I got the idea of the little-drawers: wondered how that master of beauty in feminine costume, Florenz Ziegfeld, would have solved my problem.
" I concluded that he would have supplied the most beautiful undies his genius could have created for the scene, no matter whether the woman he was dealing with was supposed to have worn that Bort or not. So I decided that if he would violate truth to insure beauty, I might safely do like wise! "
And there, smiling over the memory of the little garment whose
fluttering modesty in the picture held the Puritan minister's
eye--smiling tenderly over the effect of genuine beauty she had
introduced into the drab period she was portraying--I left her in the
doorway of her little dressing room, nodding her goodbye to me as I
walked across the verandah, down the stairs, and out of her life.
EPILOGUE.
AND how best
can I frame for you the general scope of my impression of Lillian Gish, the larger picture I brought away with me? How better
than by telling you what the man most qualified in all the world to discuss her thinks about her?
Hear, then, the brief verdict of David Wark Griffith, for whose answer to one question I crossed the continent:
"No greater actress ever lived, on stage or screen, than Lillian Gish. All her pictures have ideals and, more important still, ideas.
Never a mean thought, never an unkind one, never a gesture or a.
glance but what the world is better and happier for having witnessed it.
"Each of her pictures shows a distinct advantage in art and truth and beauty. I hold my breath when I think of the heights she is yet to reach!
"And greater than any picture she has ever made, more lovely than any she is ever likely to make, is her exquisite devotion to her mother. Never mentioned, never revealed, never exploited, Lillian Gish's love for the woman who bore her is finer than anything she has ever done on the screen.
It is' the most beautiful thing in her life--a life filled with beauty and with truth."
'THE END
Last modified on: Friday, August 8, 1997.