It was approaching the hop-picking season. The stranded young actor’s funds were reaching bottom. Something must be done.
In California, in those days, quite nice people picked hops. Mother and father, young folks, and the children, went. Being the dry season, they’d live in the open; pick hops by day, and at night dance and sing.
Lawrence Griffith decided it would be a healthful, a colorful, and a more remunerative experience than picking up theatrical odd jobs, to join the hop pickers up Ukiah way. So for a few weeks he picked hops and mingled with thrifty, plain people and operatic Italians who drank “dago red” and sang the sextette from “Lucia” while they picked their portion. Here he saved money and got atmosphere for a play. Sent me a box of sweet-smelling hops from the fields, too!
A brief engagement as leading ingénue with Florence Roberts had cheered me in the interval, even though Fred Belasco made me feel utterly unworthy of my thirty-five dollar salary. “My God,” said he when I presented my first week’s voucher, “they don’t give a damn what they do with my money.”
However, Mr. Griffith soon returned to San Francisco. He hoped to do something with his playlet. Martin Beck, the vaudeville magnate, who was then manager of the Orpheum Theatre and booked acts over the Orpheum Circuit, said to let him see a rehearsal.
Such excitement! I was to play a little Colonial girl and appear at our own Orpheum Theatre in an act that had played New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and other awesome cities. Mr. Beck booked for the week and gave us a good salary, but could not offer enough consecutive bookings to make a road tour pay, so that was that.
In the meantime Oliver Morosco had opened his beautiful Majestic Theatre in upper Market Street, with “In the Palace of the King.” The New York company lacking a blind Inez, I got the part, and the dramatic critic, Ashton Stevens, gave me a great notice. In the next week’s bill, “Captain Barrington,” I played a scene which brought me a paragraph from Mr. Stevens captioned “An Actress with more than Looks.” On the strength of this notice Mr. Morosco sent me to play ingénues at his Burbank Theatre in Los Angeles, at twenty-five dollars per week.
Barney Bernard was stepping out just now. He wanted to see what he could do away from the musical skits of Kolb and Dill. So he found a play called “The Financier.” “Lawrence” Griffith had a little job in it. The hardest part of the job was to smoke a cigar in a scene—it nearly made him ill. But he had a good season, six weeks with salary paid.
That over, came a call to Los Angeles to portray the Indian, Alessandro, in a dramatization of Helen Hunt Jackson’s famous novel “Ramona.”
It was pleasant for us to see each other. We went out to San Gabriel Mission together. Mr. Griffith afterwards used the Mission as the setting for a short story—a romantic satire which he called “From Morning Until Night.” His brief engagement over, “Lawrence” went back to San Francisco, and my Morosco season ending shortly afterward, I followed suit.