CHAPTER XIVMARY PICKFORD HAPPENS ALONG
Itwas a bright May morning in 1909. When I came off the scene, I noticed a little girl sitting quietly in a corner near the door. She looked about fourteen. I afterwards learned she was nearing seventeen. She wore a plain navy-blue serge suit, a blue-and-white striped lawn shirtwaist, a rolled brim Tuscan straw sailor hat with a dark blue ribbon bow. About her face, so fresh, so pretty, and so gentle, bobbed a dozen or more short golden curls—such perfect little curls as I had never seen.
A timid applicant usually hugged the background. Bold ones would press forward to the camera and stand there, obtruding themselves, in the hope that the director would see them, like their look, and engage them for a day’s work.
But Mary Pickford tucked herself away in a niche, while she quietly gave us “the once over.” The boss’s eagle eye had been roving her way at intervals, the while he directed, for here was something “different”—a maid so fair and an actress to boot! Pausing a moment in his work, he came over to me and said, “Don’t you think she would be good for Pippa?”
“Ideal,” I answered.
Before we closed shop that day, he had Mary make up—gave her a violin, and told her to walk across the stage while playing it so that Billy Bitzer could make a test.
Before she left the studio that day, every actor therehad a “line” on Mary. In the dressing-room, the word went around:
“There’s a cute kid outside; have you seen her?”
“No, where is she?”
“She’s been sitting out there in a corner by herself.”
“Guess I’ll take a look.”
“She’s cute all right; they’re taking a test.”
Something was impending. There was excitement and expectancy in the air. America’s Sweetheart was soon to make her first screen appearance.
The test was O. K. and Mary was told to come to the studio on the morrow. David promised her five dollars a day for her first picture, and were her work good, he’d talk business with her. That satisfied Mary.
As “Giannina,” the pretty daughter of Taddeo Ferrari, in “The Violin Maker of Cremona” Mary Pickford made her motion picture début. She was ideally suited to the part, and had good support from David Miles as the cripple Filippo.
The studio bunch was all agog over the picture and the new girl, long before the quiet word was passed to the regulars a few days later: “Projection room, they’re going to run ‘The Violin Maker.’” After the showing, Mr. Griffith had a serious conversation with Mary and offered her twenty-five dollars a week for three days’ work. This Mary accepted. She felt she might stay through the summer.
Her second picture was “The Lonely Villa,” the brain child of Mack Sennett, gleaned from a newspaper—good old-fashioned melodrama. Mary played a child of twelve with two younger sisters and a mother. They were nice people, and wealthy. Miss Leonard, playing the mother,would be beautifully arrayed in the brown-silk-and-velvet. But what could be done for Mary? She had no clothes fit for the wealthy little aristocrat she was to portray and there was nothing in the meager stock wardrobe for her. “Oh, she’s so pretty,” I said to my husband, “can’t we dress her up? She’ll just be darling in the right kind of clothes.” So he parted with twenty dollars from the cash register and trusted me to dispose of it at Best’s—then on Twenty-third Street—for a proper wardrobe. Off I went on my joyful errand, and brought back to the studio a smart pale blue linen frock, blue silk stockings to match, and nifty patent leather pumps. What a dainty little miss she looked, her fluffy curls a-bobbing, when she had donned the new pretties!
During the dreary waits between scenes, there being no private dressing-rooms, actors would be falling all over each other, and they could find seclusion only by digging themselves in behind old and unused scenery. Owen Moore was especially apt in hiding himself. He had an unfriendly way of disappearing. None of the herd instinct in him. At times we had quite a job locating him. Cruising along the back drop of a Coney Island Police Court, or perhaps a section of the Chinese wall, we’d innocently stumble upon him. But we didn’t need to hunt him the day that Mary Pickford was all dressed up in Best & Company’s best. That day he never left the camera stand, and his face was all one generous Irish smile. (How little we know when our troubles are going to begin!)
Following “The Lonely Villa” came “The Way of Man” and then a series of comedies in which Mary was teamed with Billy Quirk, “Sweet and Twenty,” “They Would Elope,” “His Wife’s Visitors.”
Though Mary Pickford affiliated with the movies for twenty-five dollars weekly with the understanding that she would work three days a week and play “parts” only, she was a good sport and would come in as an “extra” in a scene if we needed her. So occasionally in a courtroom scene, or a church wedding where the camera was set up to get the congregation or spectators from the rear, Mary could attend with perfect safety as the Pickford curls, from the back of her head, would never have been recognized by the most enthusiastic fan of that day. Mr. Griffith would not have his “Mary” a “super.”
Considering the stellar position she has held for years, and her present-day affluence, many movie fans may think that Mary Pickford was kissed by the fairies when she was born. Not so. Life’s hard realities—the understanding of her little family’s struggles to make both ends meet when she was even as young as Jackie Coogan at the time of his first appearance with Charlie Chaplin in “The Kid”—that was her fairy’s kiss—that and her mother’s great love for her.
Of course, such idolatry as Mrs. Smith gave her first-born might have made of her a simpering silly, or worse. But Gladys Smith (as Mary Pickford was born) was pretty—and she had talent and brains. So what wonder if Mother Smith often sat all through the night at her child’s bedside, not wanting to sleep, but only to worship her beautiful daughter?
Mary told me her story in our early intimate days together in the movies. With her little gang she was playing in the streets of Toronto where she was born, perhaps playing “bean bag”—she was indeed young enough for that.
From “Wark” to “work,” with only the difference of a vowel.(Seep. 185)
From “Wark” to “work,” with only the difference of a vowel.(Seep. 185)
From “Wark” to “work,” with only the difference of a vowel.
(Seep. 185)
Biograph’s one automobile (note D. W. G. on door), in front of Old Redonda Hotel.(Seep. 185)
Biograph’s one automobile (note D. W. G. on door), in front of Old Redonda Hotel.(Seep. 185)
Biograph’s one automobile (note D. W. G. on door), in front of Old Redonda Hotel.
(Seep. 185)
Annie Lee. From “Enoch Arden,” the first two-reel picture.(Seep. 195)
Annie Lee. From “Enoch Arden,” the first two-reel picture.(Seep. 195)
Annie Lee. From “Enoch Arden,” the first two-reel picture.
(Seep. 195)
Jeanie Macpherson, Frank Grandin, Linda Griffith and Wilfred Lucas, in “Enoch Arden.”
Jeanie Macpherson, Frank Grandin, Linda Griffith and Wilfred Lucas, in “Enoch Arden.”
The vessel that was towed from San Pedro. From “Enoch Arden.”
The vessel that was towed from San Pedro. From “Enoch Arden.”
The Norwegian’s shack, the scene of Enoch’s departure. From “Enoch Arden.”
The Norwegian’s shack, the scene of Enoch’s departure. From “Enoch Arden.”
In frock coat and silk hat an advance agent was looking over the prospects for business in the town, and at the same time looking for a few kids needed in his show. His eye caught pretty little Gladys Smith. Would Mama let her play at the opera house?
“Let’s ask Mama.”
Mama, the young Mrs. Smith, consented. Seeing that, a very few years afterwards, through an accident on the St. Lawrence River boat on which her husband worked, Mama was suddenly left a young widow with three tiny youngsters to support, her consent that day proved to be one of those things just meant to be.
With the Valentine Stock Company in her home town when only five, Mary played her first part,Cissyin “The Silver King.” In 1902, Mary was already a “star,” playingJessiein “The Fatal Wedding.” The season of 1904 found Gladys Smith, then twelve years old, playing leading parts, such asDollyin “The Child Wife,” a play written by Charles Taylor, first husband to Laurette and the father of her two children. The following season Gladys Smith created the part ofFrecklesin “The Gypsy Girl,” written by Hal Reid, father of the popular and much loved Wallace Reid. Gladys Smith’s salary was then forty dollars per week and she sent her mother, who was living in Brooklyn, fifteen dollars weekly for her support. In 1906 the Smith family toured with Chauncey Olcott in “Edmund Burke.” But it was as the little boyPatsy Poorin “New York Life” that Mary’s chance came for better things.
David Belasco had told Gladys he would give her a hearing. And so the day came when on the dark and empty Stage of the Republic Theatre, a chair her only “support,” Gladys did Patsy’s death scene for Mr. Belasco and he thought so well of it that she was engaged for CharlotteWalker’s younger sisterBettyin “The Warrens of Virginia.”
So “The Warrens of Virginia” with Gladys Smith, rechristened by Mr. Belasco “Mary Pickford” (a family name) came and went. The magic wand of Belasco had touched Mary, but magic wands mean little when one needs to eat. “The Warrens of Virginia” finished its run, and Mary, her seventeen years resting heavily upon her, was confronted with the long idle summer and the nearly depleted family exchequer. So arrived the day in the late spring, when from the weary round of agencies and with faint hope of signing early for next season little Mary wandered to the old Biograph studio at 11 East Fourteenth Street.
Such a freshly sweet and pretty little thing she was, that her chances of not being engaged were meagre. Since that day when she first cast her lot with the movies—that day in June, 1909, when the Pickford releases so inauspiciously started, they have continued with only one interruption. That was in January, 1913, when in David Belasco’s production of “The Good Little Devil,” she co-starred with Ernest Truex. What an exciting day at the studio it was when it was discovered that Mr. Belasco was up in the projection room seeing some of Mary’s pictures!
Mary’s return to the legitimate was a clever move. It made for publicity and afterward served her, despite the shortness of the engagement, as a qualification for becoming an Adolph Zukor-Famous Player.
Mr. Zukor established his “Famous Players” through the production of “Queen Elizabeth,” the first feature picture with a famous player, the player being no less a personagethan the divine Sara Bernhardt. This was in 1912. So when Mary Pickford became a Famous Player, it caused considerable comment. However, she has become the most famous of all the Famous Players engaged by Mr. Zukor.
And as for Famous Players, long before Adolph Zukor’s day, they had been appearing before a movie camera. As far back as 1903 Joseph Jefferson played in his famous “Rip Van Winkle” for the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company. And Sara Bernhardt appeared asCamille, in the Eclair Company’s two-reel production of the Dumas play in 1911.
Mary Pickford did not reach the peak of fame and affluence without her “ifs.” When the first fall came, and little Mary had not connected up with a legitimate job, she said to me one day: “Miss Arvidson, we have just fifty dollars in the bank for all of us, and I’m worried to death. I want to get back on the stage. Of course, the pictures are regular, but if I had enough put away, I’d get out.”
Another day: “If I stay in the movies I know I will just be ruined for the stage—the acting is so different—and I never use my voice. Do you think it will hurt me if I stay in the pictures any longer?”
“Well, Mary,” I answered, “I cannot advise you. We all just have to take our chances.”
Good fortune it was for the movies, for her family and for her, that she stayed. In the beginning she encountered practically no competition. Not until dainty Marguerite Clark left the field of the legitimate in 1913 and appeared in her first charming photoplay “Wildflower” did Miss Pickford ever need to bother her little head overanything as improbable as a legitimate competitor in a field where she had reigned as queen undisputed and unchallenged.
It is often asked whether Mary Pickford is a good business woman. My opinion is that she’s a very good business woman. And I am told that she had a head for business as far back as the days ofPatsy Poor. She must have an understudy and no one but sister Lottie was going to be that understudy. Lottie stayed the season even though no emergency where she could have officiated, presented itself.
I know Mary brought a business head with her to Biograph. Mr. Griffith had told her if she’d be a good sport about doing what little unpleasant stunts the stories might call for, he would raise her salary. The first came in “They Would Elope,” some two months after her initiation.
The scene called for the overturning of the canoe in which the elopers were escaping down the muddy Passaic. Not a second did Mary demur, but obediently flopped into the river. The scene over, wet and dirty, the boys fished her out and rushed her, wrapped in a warm blanket, to the waiting automobile.
It was the last scene of the day—we reserved the nasty ones for the finish. Mary’s place in the car was between my husband and myself. Hardly were we comfortably settled, hardly had the chauffeur time to put the car in “high,” before Mary with all the evidence of her good sportsmanship so plainly visible, naïvely looked up into her director’s face and sweetly reminded him of his promise. She got her raise. And I got the shock of my young life. That pretty little thing with yellow curls thinking of money like that!
Later, when Carl Laemmle had bucked the General Film Company with the organization of his independent company, the “Imp,” he enticed Mary away from the Biograph by an offer of twenty-five dollars a week over her then one hundred weekly salary. Mary was still under legal age, so Owen Moore, to whom Mary had been secretly married, had to sign the contract. He with several other “Biographers” had gone over to the “Imp.” Mrs. Smith with Lottie and Jack still clung to the Biograph. Mid anguished tears Mrs. Smith showed me the contract, and in a broken voice said: “What’s to become of Mary at that awful ‘Imp’ with no one to direct her? How could she have been influenced to leave Mr. Griffith for only twenty-five dollars extra and not even consult her mother? What good will the twenty-five dollars do with her career ruined?”
But the break did not hurt Mary. It helped her. She soon sued the “Imp,” claiming that her artistic career was being ruined as she was being forced to act with carpenters. That was the story according to the dailies. Shortly afterward she was back at Biograph with another twenty-five dollar weekly advance in her salary.