At Paterson, New Jersey, we found a feudal castle. It belonged to one Mr. Lambert, a silk manufacturer. Here we did “The Call to Arms” where little Mary donned tights for the first and only time, playing a page, and looking picturesque on a medieval horse, but being a very unhappy Mary for a reason that none of us knew.
How she fussed about those tights—nearly shed tears. She sat on the lawn all wrapped up in the generous folds of her velvet cape, and wouldn’t budge until she was called for her scene, and she talked so strangely. For Owen was there, and all the other actors were to see her in the tights, and Mary and Owen had a secret—a secret that made such a situation quite unbearable. She had confided it only to “Doc,” but the rest of us had been wondering.
What a miserable, hot, muggy day it was. Tolerable only sitting on the grassy slopes of the Lambert estate, but how awful in the rooms of the little frame hotel over by the railroad tracks where we had made up and where some of the actors were still awaiting orders as to how they should dress.
Dell Henderson, who was assisting Mr. Griffith on this picture, was laboring back and forth from the castle to the hotel bringing orders to the waiting actors as they were needed. Sennett was one of the waiting ones, and he was all humped up in his pet grouch when Dell entered and said, “Here, Sennett, the boss says for you to don this armor.”
“Armor, in this heat? Armor? I guess I won’t wear armor.” Then a short pause, “Are you going to wear armor?”
“Yes, I’m no teacher’s pet,” said Dell, as he gathered to himself the pieces of his suit of mail and began to climb into them. So the doubting Mack Sennett could do naught but imitate him, for no matter how balky his manner, one word from the boss and he became a good little boy again.
In August we were once more back in Cuddebackville. The O. and W.’s conductor was no longer skeptical of our visits. We brought so many actors sometimes that we not only filled the little Inn but had to find neighboring farmhouses in which to park the overflow.
We met all the old Cuddebacks again. We never realized what a tribe they were until we had to do a scene in a cemetery, and every grave we picked made trouble for us with some Cuddeback or other still living. How to get away with it we didn’t know until we hit upon the idea of simultaneously enacting a fake but intensely melodramatic scene down by the General Store. That did the trick. All the villagers missed their lunch that day and were unaware of the desecration of their dead.
“Wally” Walthall gave his famous fried chicken luncheon at the minister’s house. Talent was versatile. We’d worked through our lunch hour this day, so it was either go lunchless or beg the privilege of slaughtering some of the minister’s wife’s tempting spring chickens and cooking them in her kitchen. That’s how “Wally” had the opportunity to prove his fried chicken the equal of any Ritz-Carlton’s.
We met up with old Pete again. Although nearly ninety, he was worrying his faithful spouse into a deep and dark melancholia. Pete drove the big bus, rigged up for our use out of one of his old farm wagons. It was usually filled with “actresses”—wicked females from the city who wore gay clothes and put paint on their faces. What a good time old Pete did have once out on the highway! What a chatter, chatter, chatter he did maintain! Never had he dreamed of such intimacy with ladies out of a the-ayter!