Mr. Griffith got badly annoyed when we had such experiences. His job worried him, the nasty publicity of doing our work in the street, like ditch diggers. So he had to pick on some one and I was handy. How could I stand for it? Why was I willing to endure it? He had to, of course. So thinking to frighten me and make me a good girl who’d stay home, he said: “Something has occurred to me; it’s probable this business might get kind of public—some day, you know, you may get in the subway and have all the people stare at you while they whisper to each other, ‘That’s that girl we saw in the movie the other night.’ And how would you like that?”
One saving grace the Highlands had for us. We could get a swim sometimes. And we discovered Galilee, a fishing village about twenty miles down the coast, the locale of that first version of Enoch Arden—“After Many Years.”
But when winter came, though we lost the spectators we acquired other discomforts. Our make-up would be frozen, and the dreary, cold, damp rooms in the country hotels made us shivery and miserable. We’d hurriedly climb into our costumes, drag on our coats, and then light our little alcohol stove or candle to get the make-up sufficiently smeary. When made up, out into the cold, crisp day. One of the men would have a camp-fire going where we’d huddle between scenes and keep limber enough to act. Then when ready for the scene Billy Bitzer would have to light the little lamp that he attached to the camera on cold days to warm the film so it wouldn’t be streaked with “lightning.” While that was going on we stood at attention, ready to do our bit when the film was.
We weren’t so keen on playing leads on such days as those, for when you are half frozen it isn’t so easy to look as if you were calmly dying of joy, for which emotional state the script might be asking. What we liked best in the winter was to follow Mack Sennett in the chases which he always led, and which he made so much of, later, when he became the big man in Keystone films. The chase warmed us up, for Mack Sennett led us on some merry jaunts, over stone walls, down gulleys, a-top of fences—whatever looked good and hard to do.
Somehow we found it difficult to be always working with the weather. Though we watched carefully it seemed there always were “summer” stories to be finished, almost up to snow time; and “winter” stories in the works when June roses were in bud. Pink swiss on a bleak November day ’neath the leafless maple didn’t feel so good; nor did velvet and fur and heavy wool in the studio in humid August.
But such were the things that happened. We accepted them with a good grace.
CHAPTER XIII
AT THE STUDIO
This story must now take itself indoors. We are terribly excited over Tolstoy’s “Resurrection.” So even though it be May, we must to the studio where the carpenters and scene painters are fixing us a Siberia.
As the days went by we produced many works of literary masters—Dickens, Scott, Shakespeare, Bret Harte, O. Henry, and Frank Norris. We never bothered about “rights” for the little one-reel versions of five-act plays and eight hundred page novels. Authors and publishers were quite unaware of our existence.
Arthur Johnson, Owen Moore, and Florence Lawrence played the leading parts in our “free adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s Powerful Novel.” And it so happened that just as Prince Demetri was ready to don his fur robes, and the poor exiles their woolen slips, for the trudge over the snow-clad steppes, a nice hot spell came our way, and we must have been the hottest Russians that ever endured Siberia.