Lillian got the dress.
Occasionally, Miss Gish took advantage of a beauty sleep. On such occasions she seldom arrived before eleven in the morning. And when she went to a party she played the rôle of the sphinx, and all evening long never spoke. But little Mae Marsh made up for her; she chattered incessantly.
Lillian’s dope was to come and go without being noticed. She appeared one time at a midnight performance of “Shuffle Along” done up in black veils to the tip of her nose and a fur collar covering her mouth, with only little spots of cheek showing. Dorothy, on the other hand, acting like a real human being, was calling out to her friends, “Hello there, hello, hello,” but Lillian, passing an old acquaintance, merely said, “Forgive me for not stopping and speaking; I don’t want any one to know I am here.” But as everybody was awfully busy having a good time and no one seemed to be particularly disturbed by Miss Gish’s hiding away, she finally took her hat off and revealed herself.
But she came out of her seclusion that time she preached in answer to the Rev. John Roach Straton at his church on Fifty-seventh Street. Some one was needed to answer the Rev. Mr. Straton’s knocks on the theatre and its people. Lillian came forward, and she so impressed her brother-in-law, James Rennie, Dorothy’s husband, that he arrived late at a Sunday rehearsal of a George Cohan show. In perfect Sunday morning outfit, striped pants and gloves and cane he burst upon the rehearsal and quite breathlessly spluttered, “Please forgive me for being late, but I have just heard my sister-in-law preach a sermon, and never in my life have I heard anything so inspiring in a church. Don’t go very often. More in Lillian than one suspects.”
Mr. Cohan gave himself time to digest Mr. Rennie’s outburst, and then went on with the rehearsal.
* * * * *
Inevitable the parting of the ways. Though the last word as to modern equipment, the new studio merely chilled. That atmosphere of an old manse that had prevailed at 11 East Fourteenth Street, did not abide in the concrete and perfect plumbing and office-like dressing rooms at East 175th Street. The last word in motion picture studios brought Biograph no luck. For as a producing unit, after a few short years they breathed their last, and quietly passed out of the picture. When the doors at the old studio closed on our early struggles, when Biograph left its original nursery of genius, was the proper time for Mr. Griffith to have left the company. In the fall, less than a year later, he did.
CHAPTER XXVII
SOMEWHAT DIGRESSIVE
From the old Biograph Stock Company they graduated, scenario writers as well as actors; and here and there they went, filling bigger jobs in other companies, as actors, directors, and scenario editors.
And as manager and head director of the Kinemacolor Company went David Miles. Directly upon leaving Biograph, Mr. Miles had spent a short time at the “Imp” with Mary Pickford and her family, King Baggott, George Loane Tucker, Gaston Bell, Isabel Rea, and Tom Ince. Leaving “Imp,” he had gone over to Reliance. While at Reliance, and in need of a handsome young juvenile, there came to mind his friend Gaston Bell.