Griffith had money to work with, now, and spent it like Belshazzar himself. “Intolerance” required a year and a half to make, and an expenditure of nearly two million dollars.
Some of the items are impressive: A jeweled costume for the “Princess Beloved” cost seven thousand dollars; the dancing-girls at the feast of Belshazzar, twenty-thousand—a good deal more than they ever cost that early Belshazzar, even in his palmiest days, but of course these were war prices.
“Intolerance” was shown for the first time at the Liberty Theatre, New York, September 6, 1916. Its magnificence impressed the public. What wouldn’t Griffith do next? On the night of April 6, 1917, Griffith personally presented “Intolerance,” at the Drury Lane Theatre, London.
On that day, the United States entered the World War.
IX
THERE WERE NO LOVE AFFAIRS
Lillian did not consider that she was really in the new picture. To Nell she wrote: “I am not in it in person, but my heart runs all through it—and it seems more to belong to me than all my other work together.” As of course it did—the mother who, through the ages, rocked humanity’s cradle.
She had made a number of smaller pictures, meantime—very good pictures, if we consult the notices, which even sometimes forgot to remember that she was the “most beautiful blonde in the world.” How tired she had become of that phrase! “If they want an angel on a wire, they send for me,” she told one reporter, who managed to omit Belasco, though he did call her “a young goddess” and a “daffodil.” You couldn’t stop them.
The pictures she made at this time were important only as they were steps of development—program pictures, little remembered today. “Diane of the Follies,” in which she played a kind of vamp and wore remarkable costumes, was more memorable.
“But Diane was very easy to play,” she said afterwards. “Anybody can play a character of that sort—it plays itself. It is the part of a good woman, whose colorless life has to be made interesting, that is hard.”
Her own life could hardly be said to be exciting. There were no love affairs. Plenty of opportunities, but she was always too busy for such things, or for the social life, of which there was now a good deal. “I was not gay enough for the parties; Dorothy was sought, for those. They didn’t care much about me.” And once she wrote: