IV
A STUDIO ON PICO STREET
California sunshine, California Zinfandel—doctor’s orders, fifty cents a gallon—open air and exercise—worked their miracle. The pictures were made out-of-doors—even the interior sets were on an outside stage, with daylight illumination—and there were many “Westerns,” with riding.
In no time, Lillian, like Dorothy and the others, went racing over the hills behind Los Angeles—an Indian, a cowboy, a settler, a pursued heroine—sometimes all of those things in one day; for there was no star aristocracy in Griffith’s troupe. One might be a star one hour, and an extra the next, and nobody cared, and everybody was happy, and Lillian grew well, and physically hardened to the demands of picture making—by no means light.
Her riding practice with the Indian girl at Shawnee came in handy now. A horse, even a wild one, had no terrors for her. In one of the early pictures, Lillian, with two men, Raoul Walsh and George Siegman, were chosen for some special riding. The horses were range ponies—one of them looked dangerous. The men regarded him doubtfully. Lillian said, “I’ll take him.” He seemed to her no worse than those she had ridden in Oklahoma.
They swept by the camera beautifully, but they were supposed to turn and do it again. The others turned, but Lillian’s horse went on. His nose was toward the ranch. There were some trees and bushes, and he tore through them, to get her off his back.
Now, it happened that an Indian, a real Indian, named “Eagle Eye” lay asleep among the bushes, and the pounding hoofs awakened him. A real Indian knows what to do under such circumstances. He leaped straight from his nap, caught the mad pony’s bridle, and the heroine was saved.
In another picture, she had to jump from a buckboard, behind a runaway team, to a cowboy’s arms. Christy Cabanné was the director, and Bobby Burns, of the Burns Brothers who did most of the dangerous riding, was the cowboy rescuer. Lillian had no fear of the jump—her faith in Bobby was perfect—but the pony he was riding sank beneath the suddenly added weight, and nearly went down. “Closest and most dangerous thing I ever did,” Bobby said when it was over.
Lillian loved California, and why not? It had given her a new freedom, and with it, her health. News came of the arrival of Nell’s baby. Incredible to think of Nell with a baby! “Oh, Nell, does it really belong to you?” And a few lines further along, “This is a wonderful country! How I wish you could be here; it would do you so much good. It is just like summer, and they have wonderful mocking-birds and beautiful nights.”
I do not know the name of Lillian’s first California picture, nor the sequence of those that followed. Nobody today seems to remember these things, and they are not very important. There was a good deal of sameness about the Westerns, and most of them were that. “A Misunderstood Boy” was among the titles, “Just Gold,” and “The Lady and the Mouse”; but as Griffith was turning out pictures at the rate of one, or two and even three, a week—short films, in those days—these titles suggest no more than brief stages of preparation for the day a year or two later when he would begin to write the Greater Picture story across the screens of the world.