What I suffered! I had a husband who beat and deserted me; I had to appear against him in court, and I fainted and did a beautiful fall on the court-room floor. After my acquittal I took my two babies and deposited them on a wealthy doorstep; wandered off to the New Jersey Palisades; took a flying leap and landed a mass of broken bones at the bottom of the cliff.
Selected for the fall was a beautiful smooth boulder which had a sheer drop on the side the camera did not get of possibly some fifteen feet to a ledge about six feet wide, from which ledge, to the bottom of the Palisades, was a precipitous descent of some hundred feet.
There were so many rehearsals of this scene of self-destruction that the rock acquired a fine polish as “mother” slipped and slid about. That the camera man’s assistant might try the stunt for at least the initial attempts at getting the focus, never occurred to a soul. But a suggestion was made that if “mother” removed her shoes she might not slide off so easily. Which she did for the remaining rehearsals. Then finally as the sun sank behind the Palisades, “mother” in her last emotional moments, sank behind the boulder.
On that picture I made twenty-eight dollars; oh, what a lot of money! The most to date. If pictures kept up like that! And the whole twenty-eight was mine, all mine, and I invested it at Hackett, Carhart on Broadway and Thirteenth in a spring outfit—suit, shoes, hat, oh, everything.
The picture—the only one Mr. Taylor directed—lacked continuity. Upstairs in his executive office, Mr. Henry Norton Marvin was walking the floor and wondering what about it. Why couldn’t they get somewhere with these movies? Another man fallen down on the job. Genial Arthur Marvin, H. N.’s brother, and Billy Bitzer’s assistant at the camera, was being catechized as to whether he had noticed any promising material about the studio.
“Well,” drawled the genial Arthur, “I don’t know. They’re a funny lot, these actors, but there’s one young man, there’s one actor seems to have ideas. You might try him.”
“You think he might get by, eh?”
“Well, I don’t think you’d lose much by trying him.”
“What’s his name? I’ll send for him.”
“Griffith. Lawrence Griffith.”