“I do not care for the talking pictures. They seem to me incongruous. Even the lip movements, to give the effect of speech, seemed to me all wrong. The silent film at its best was a beautiful thing, and lovely effects could be produced with it. To make the pictures speak seems to me a mistake. Oh, I’m sorry I made the ‘Romantic Night.’
“Charlie Chaplin’s picture,” she went on—“I want it to be a success. He is one of the few who can do what he likes. Mary can do that, too, and Douglas. None of the rest of us. Yes, the people want the talking pictures now, but maybe there will be a change. There should be music, of course. The pictures need music.
“Griffith, in his way, is an artist—too much of an artist ever to be rich. He has shown the others the way to fortune—he has not travelled it himself. Nothing satisfied him but the best—completeness. He did not regard cost. Sometimes in the cause of completeness, he overdid. In ‘Intolerance,’ for example.
“Yes, I have written, from time to time, about the pictures. Not long ago I did an article for Oliver Sayler’s book, ‘Revolt in the Arts,’ and I did one on ‘Motion Pictures,’ for the Encyclopaedia Britannica. They sent me a check, which I have kept as a souvenir. It was for twenty-one dollars.”
She told me some of the happenings of her childhood, half pathetic, amusing things, over which one hardly knew whether to laugh or weep. I was not surprised to find that she had a happy, delicate sense of humor—I have yet to meet anyone worthwhile without it.
She spoke of Mark Twain—of her love for his work, especially “Huckleberry Finn.” Later, of “Mickey Mouse”: “I could see an entire show of nothing else.”
She spoke of her mother, her early hardships, her final break. “All those years of struggle and privation had to be paid for; her capital of health and strength were exhausted, utterly.”
Her face, in the fading light, reflected from the river, took on an added unreality.
“This is my favorite part of the day,” she said, and it came to me that her remark, and the manner of it, removed her a step farther from her surroundings: that she was, in fact, of Arcady.