When the Movies Were Young/Chapter 2
CHAPTER II
ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS
BUT now to go back to the beginning.
It was a night in the summer of 1904 in my dear and fascinating old San Francisco, before the life we all knew and loved had been broken in two, never to be mended, by the disaster of the great fire and earthquake. At the old Alcazar Theatre the now historic stock company was producing Mr. Hall Caine's drama "The Christian."
In the first act the fishermaidens made merry in the village square.
Unknown to family or friends, and with little pride in my humble beginning, I mingled as one of the fishergirls. Three dollars and fifty cents a week was the salary Fred Belasco (David's brother) paid me for my bit of Hall Caine interpretation, so I, for one, had no need to be horrified some four years later when I was paid three dollars a day for playing the same fishermaiden in support of Mary Pickford, who, under Mr. Griffith's direction, was making Glory Quayle into a screen heroine.
Here at the old Alcazar were wonderful people I could worship. There was Oza Waldrop, and John Craig, and Mary Young, Eleanor Gordon, Frances Starr, and Frank Bacon. Kindly, sweet Frank Bacon whose big success, years later, as Lightnin' Bill Jones, in his own play "Lightnin'," made not the slightest change in his simple, unpretentious soul. Mr. Bacon had written a play called "In the Hills of California." It was to be produced for a week's run at Ye Liberty Theatre, Oakland, California, and I was to play the ingénue.
One little experience added to another little experience fortified me with sufficient courage to call on managers of visiting Eastern road companies who traveled short of "maids," "special guests at the ball," and "spectators at the races." New York was already beckoning, and without funds for a railroad ticket the only way to get there was to join a company traveling that way.
A summing up of previous experiences showed a recital at Sherman and Clay Hall and two weeks on tour in Richard Walton Tully's University of California's Junior farce "James Wobberts, Freshman."
In the company were Mr. Tully and his then wife, Eleanor Gates, the author; Emil Kreuske, for some years now "Bill Nigh," the motion picture director; Milton Schwartz, who took to law and now practices in Hollywood; Dick Tully and his wife Olive Vail. Elmer Harris of the original college company did not go. Elmer is now partner to Frank E. Woods along with Thompson Buchanan in Mr. Wood's new producing company.
The recital at Sherman and Clay Hall on Sutter Street was a most ambitious effort. My job-hunting pal, Harriet Quimby, a girl I had met prowling about the theaters, concluded we were getting nowhere and time was fleeting. So we hit on a plan to give a recital in San Francisco's Carnegie Hall, and invite the dramatic critics hoping they would come and give us good notices.
The Homer Henley Quartette which we engaged would charge twenty dollars. The rent of the hall was twenty. We should have had in hand forty dollars, and between us we didn't own forty cents.
Harriet Quimby knew Arnold Genthe, and, appreciating her rare beauty, Mr. Genthe said he would make her photos for window display for nothing. Oscar Mauer did the same for me, gratis. Rugs and furniture we borrowed, and the costumes by advertising in the program, we rented cheaply.
We understood only this much of politics: Jimmy Phelan, our Mayor (afterwards Senator James H. Phelan) was a very wealthy man, charitably disposed, and one day we summoned up sufficient courage to tell him our trouble. Most attentively and respectfully he heard us and without a moment's hesitation gave us the twenty.
So we gave the recital. We sold enough tickets to pay the Homer Henleys, but not enough to pay the debt to Mr. Phelan. He's never been paid these many years though I've thought of doing it often, and will do it some day.
However, the critics came and they gave us good notices, but the recital didn't seem to put much of a dent in our careers. Harriet Quimby soon achieved New York via The Sunset Magazine. In New York she "caught on," and became dramatic critic on Leslie's Weekly.
The honor of being the first woman in America to receive an aviator's license became hers, as also that of being the first woman to pilot a monoplane across the English Channel. That was in the spring of 1912, a few months before her death while flying over Boston Harbor.
Mission Street, near Third, was in that unique section called South-of-the-Slot. The character of the community was such, that to reside there, or even to admit of knowing residents there meant complete loss of social prestige. Mission Street, which was once the old road that led over blue and yellow lupin-covered hills out to the Mission Dolores of the Spanish Fathers, and was later the place where the elegantly costumed descendants of the forty-niners who had struck pay dirt (and kept it) strolled, held, at the time of which I speak, no reminder of its departed glory except the great romantic old Grand Opera House, which, amid second-hand stores, pawn-shops, cheap restaurants, and saloons, languished in lonely grandeur.
Once in my young life Richard Mansfield played there; Henry Irving and Ellen Terry gave a week of Shakespearean repertoire; Weber and Fields came from New York for the first time and gave their show, but failed. San Franciscans thought that Kolb and Dill, Barney Bernard, and Georgie O'Ramey, who held forth nightly at Fischer's Music Hall, were just as good.
At the time of the earthquake a grand opera company headed by Caruso was singing there. Between traveling luminaries, lesser lights glimmered on the historic old stage. And for a long time, when the theater was called Morosco's Grand Opera House, ten, twenty, and thirty blood-and-thunder melodrama held the boards.
At this stage in its career, and hardly one year before the great disaster, a young actor who called himself Lawrence Griffith was heading toward the Coast in a show called "Miss Petticoats." Katherine Osterman was the star. The company stranded in San Francisco.
Melbourne MacDowell, in the last remnants of the faded glory cast upon him by Fanny Davenport, was about to tread the sacred stage of the old Grand Opera House, putting on a repertoire of the Sudermann and Sardou dramas.
Frank Bacon, always my kind adviser, suggested I should try my luck with this aggregation. So I trotted merrily down, wandered through dark alleyways, terribly thrilled, for Henry Irving had come this same way and I was walking where once he had walked.
I was to appear as a boy servant in "Fedora." I remember only one scene. It was in a sort of court room with a civil officer sitting high and mighty and calm and unperturbed on a high stool behind a high desk. I entered the room and timidly approached the desk. A deep stern voice that seemed to rise from some dark depths shouted at me, "At what hour did your master leave Blu Bla?"
I shivered and shook and finally stammered out the answer, and was mighty glad when the scene was over.
Heavens! Who was this person, anyhow?
His name, I soon learned, was Griffith—Lawrence Griffith—I never could abide that "Lawrence"! Though, as it turned out afterward, our married life might have been dull without that Christian name as a perpetual resource for argument.
Afterward, to my great joy, Mr. Griffith confided to me that he had taken the name "Lawrence" only for the stage. His real name was "David," "David Wark," but he was going to keep that name dark until he was a big success in the world, and famous. And as yet he didn't know, although he seemed very lackadaisical about it, I thought, whether he'd be great as an actor, stage director, grand opera star, poet, playwright, or novelist.
I wasn't the only one who thought he might have become a great singer. Once a New York critic reviewing a première of one of David Griffith's motion pictures, said: "The most interesting feature of Mr. Griffith's openings is to hear his wonderful voice."
"Lawrence" condescended to a little conversation now and then. He was quite encouraging at times. Said I had wonderful eyes for the stage and if I ever went to New York and got in right, I'd get jobs "on my eyes." (Sounded very funny—getting a job "on one's eyes.") Advised me never to get married if I expected to stay on the stage. Told me about the big New York actors: Leslie Carter, who had just been doing DuBarry; and David Belasco, and what a wonderful producer he was; and dainty Maude Adams; and brilliant Mrs. Fiske; and Charles Frohman; and Richard Mansfield in "Monsieur Beaucaire"; and Broadway; and Mrs. Fernandez's wonderful agency; and how John Drew got his first wonderful job through her agency at one hundred and twenty-five dollars a week!
I was eager to learn more of the big theatrical world three thousand miles away. I invited Mr. Griffith out home to lunch one day. A new world soon opened up for me—the South. The first Southerner I'd ever met was Mr. Griffith. I had known of the South only from my school history; but the one I had studied didn't tell of Colonel Jacob Wark Griffith, David's father, who fought under Stonewall Jackson in the Civil War, and was called "Thunder Jake" because of his roaring voice. He owned lots of negroes, gambled, and loved Shakespeare. There was big "Sister Mattie" who taught her little brother his lessons and who, out on the little front stoop, just before bedtime, did her best to answer all the questions the inquisitive boy would ask about the stars and other wonders.
This was all very different from being daughter to a Norseman who had settled out on San Francisco's seven hills in the winds and fogs.
The South began to loom up as a land of romance.