“Eleven East Fourteenth Street.”
“Thanks awfully. I’ll look in—so long.”
* * * * *
The elder Mr. McCutcheon was the director when David applied for a job at the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company and got it.
There were no preliminaries. He was told to go “below” and put on a little make-up. So he went “below”—to the dressing-room, but he didn’t put on a “little make-up.” He took a great deal of trouble with it although it was largely experimental, being very different from the conventional stage make-up. The only instruction he was given was to leave off the “red” which would photograph black, thus putting hollows in his cheeks. And he didn’t need hollows in his cheeks.
When he came up to the studio floor—his dressing and make-up finished—the director, and the actors especially, looked at him as though he were not quite in his right mind. “Poor boob,” they thought, to take such trouble with a “make-up” for a moving picture, a moving picture that no one who counted for anything would ever see.
After a short rehearsal, an explanation of “foreground” and instructions about keeping “inside the lines” and “outside the lines,” the camera opened up, ground away for about twenty feet, and the ordeal was over.
When work was finished for the day, Mr. McCutcheon paid his new actor five dollars and told him to call on the morrow. So the next morning there was an early start to the studio. They were to work outside, and there were to be horses!
I shall never forget the sadly amused expression my husband brought home with him, the evening of that second day. Nor his comments: “It’s not so bad, you know, five dollars for simply riding a horse in the wilds of Fort Lee on a cool spring day. I think it wouldn’t be a bad idea for you to go down and see what you can do. Don’t tell them who you are, I mean, don’t tell them you’re my wife. I think it is better business not to.”
So a few days later, I dolled up for a visit to the studio. After I had waited an hour or so, Mr. McCutcheon turned to me and said, “All right, just put a little make-up on; this isn’t very important.” There was no coaching for the acting; only one thing mattered, and that was, not to appear as though hunting frantically for the lines on the floor that marked your stage, while the scenes were being taken.