When the camera stopped, she peeped around it, the tears still shining in her eyelashes.
“Was that all right, Mr. Vidor? Or shall we try it again?”
“Well, let’s try it this way, too, and see how it looks,” in Mr. Vidor’s soft, lazy Southern accent.
So Mimi is unhappy this way and that way and several other ways, until she receives her scanty loan and turns slowly and goes out of the door. That was all of Mimi, for that time.
When next we saw her, it was at a picnic in the woods of “Ville D’Avray” ... a place of orange groves at the foot of mountains that stretch up into the lofty snow fields.
In a grassy meadow, sheltered by oak trees, the picnic was spread. Miss Gish’s town car, with its shades drawn, was already parked at one side. Through the back window of an expensive coupé, a black head swathed in a towel indicated the transformation of John Gilbert into Rodolphe....
When Miss Gish stepped out of her car and began to work, it was like the arrival of a limpid, fragrant wood elf, so exquisite was her costume and so beautiful was she herself....
When I start to write of Mimi as I last saw her, I am reminded of the sensations I had as a child, when Mother used to tell me in vain that whatever I was reading was only a play or a story.... Thus I keep assuring myself that Miss Gish is a young lady who makes enough money to live on very comfortably, and that she has beauty, fame and adoring friends.
Yet there keeps recurring the picture of our last work in “La Bohême,” of the dying Mimi, struggling across Paris to Rodolphe. Her miserable clothes are in rags, and illness has carved deep hollows in her face. Clinging to the steps of a bus, fighting weakly through crowds, falling into the gutter and crawling on upon hands and knees, dragged holding to a chain behind a cart, slowly making her way, her long, pale-gold hair falling down over her shoulders and back.
Between shots you might have thought her still playing a bit in the picture, so unpretentious was her manner. If her skirt had to be dirty for a close shot, she did not hail a prop boy, but knelt on the cobblestones and made it grimy herself....