There were other actor-Indians on this Mount Beacon picture, present-day celebrities who were thanking their stars they were being Indians with woolly blankets to pose in. There were Henry Walthall and Lily Cahill and Jeanie Macpherson and Jim Kirkwood and Donald Crisp, among others.
Donald Crisp had crept quietly into the Biograph fold as Donald Somebody Else. Occasionally, he authored poems in The Smart Set—reason for being Donald Somebody Else in the movies. Of late, Mr. Crisp has rather neglected poetry for the movies. He gave the screen his greatest acting performance as Battling Burrows in Mr. Griffith’s artistic “Broken Blossoms.”
The night that “Way Down East” opened in New York in 1920 (September 3) Donald was radiant among the audience saying his farewells, for on the morrow he was to sail for England to take charge of the Famous Players studio there, where he put on among other things “Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush.”
Claire MacDowell and her husband, Charles Mailes, joined Biograph this season. Stephanie Longfellow returned to play in more pictures; Alfred Paget began to play small parts, as did Jeanie Macpherson; also beautiful Florence LaBadie, who afterwards became a fan favorite through Thannhouser’s startlingly successful serial “The Million Dollar Mystery.” As one of the four principals, along with James Cruze of “The Covered Wagon” fame, Sidney Bracy and Marguerite Snow, she attracted much attention. A job as model to Howard Chandler Christie had preceded her venture into the movies. Her tragic death, the result of a motor accident, occurred in 1917.
Edwin August came, to look handsome in costume, playing his first part with Lucy Cotton (recently married to E. R. Thomas) in “The Fugitive,” taken on Mount Beacon. Mabel Normand, who had peeked in on us the year before, returned after a winter spent with Vitagraph.
Mabel, as every one knows, had been responsible for the lovely magazine covers by James Montgomery Flagg, and had also been model to Charles Dana Gibson, before she came to pictures, which had happened through friendship for Alice Joyce, who had also been a model, but was now leading lady at the Kalem Company. It was at Kalem, playing extras, that Mabel Normand began her rather startling movie career. Dorothy Bernard made a screen début, as did the other Dorothy who afterward became the wife of Wallace Reid.
I recall Dorothy Davenport at the Delaware Water Gap where we took some pictures that fall. She was a modish little person; she wore brown pin-check ginghams and a huge brown taffeta bow on the end of a braid of luxurious brown hair that fluttered down her back. She looked as though she came direct from Miss Prim’s boarding school for children of the élite—and so was distinctive for the movies.
Fair Lily Cahill of the tailored blue serge, plain straw “dude,” and lady-like veil worked intermittently that summer; she was always immaculately bloused in “sun-kissed linen.” Not long after the days of the Water Gap and Mount Beacon Indian pictures, Miss Cahill became a Broadway leading woman in support of that long-time matinée idol, Brandon Tynon, and somewhere along in this period she married him.
Henry Lehrman, alias Pathé, hung about. How he loved being a near-actor! How he adored getting fixed up for a picture! He was satisfied by now that his make-ups were works of art. From the dressing-room he would emerge patting his swollen chest, with the laconic remark, “Some make-up!”
Eddie Dillon returned, to smile his way through more studio days. He often engaged me in long converse. Eddie was quite flabbergasted when he learned my matrimonial status. He need not have been. For in Los Angeles on Mr. Griffith’s busy evenings he often suggested my taking in a movie with Eddie. But Eddie never knew about that.