A world’s première indeed—a tremendously important night to so many people who didn’t know it. No taxis—not one private car drew up at the curb. The house filled up from passers-by—frequenters of Union Square—lured by a ten-cent entertainment. These were the people to be pleased—they who had paid out their little nickels and dimes. So when they sat through Dolly’s seven hundred feet, interested, and not a snore was to be heard, we concluded we’d had a successful opening night.
The contract was drawn for one year. It called for forty-five dollars per week with a royalty of a mill a foot on all film sold. Mr. Marvin thought it rather foolish to accept so small a salary and assured my husband the percentage would amount to nothing whatever right off. But David was willing—rather more than willing—to gamble on himself. And he gambled rather well this time. For, the first year his royalty check went from practically nothing to four and five hundred dollars a month—before the end of the year.
Wonderful it was—too good to be true. Although, had he known then that for evermore, through weeks and months and years, it was to be movies, movies, nothing but movies, David Griffith would probably then and there have chucked the job, or, keeping it, would have wept bitter, bitter tears.
CHAPTER VIII
DIGGING IN
“Well, we’re in the movies—we’re working in the moving pictures.”
“Moving pictures? You’re working in moving pictures? What do you mean, you’re working in moving pictures?”
“We’re working at a place—they call it a studio—acting in little plays—dramas, and comedies—a camera takes pictures while we act, and the pictures are shown in those five- and ten-cent theatres that are all around the town, mostly on Third and Ninth Avenues and Fourteenth Street—such high-class neighborhoods.”
“Those dreadful places? I wouldn’t be seen going into one of them.”
Yes, that was the attitude in those dark and dismal days when David signed that contract with the Biograph Company. For one year now, those movies so covered with slime and so degraded would have to come first in his thoughts and affections. That was only fair to the job. But only one who had loved the theatre as he had, and had dreamed as he had of achieving success therein, could know what heartaches this strange new affiliation was to bring to him. Times came, agonizing days, when he would have given his life to be able to chuck the job. Mornings when on arising he would gaze long, long moments out the window, apparently seeing nothing—then the barely audible remark, “I think I’ll ’phone and say I cannot come.” On such days he dragged heavy, leaden feet to 11 East Fourteenth Street.
And there was an evening when, returning home after a drab day at the studio, and finding his modest ménage festive with ferns and wild flowers, he became so annoyed that with one swoop he gathered up nature and roughly jammed her into the waste paper basket. A visiting relative who’d helped gather the flowers worried so over the strange procedure that I had to explain—“It’s those pictures; you know they’re just the fringe of acting.”