The Norwegian’s shack, the scene of Enoch’s departure. From “Enoch Arden.”
In frock coat and silk hat an advance agent was looking over the prospects for business in the town, and at the same time looking for a few kids needed in his show. His eye caught pretty little Gladys Smith. Would Mama let her play at the opera house?
“Let’s ask Mama.”
Mama, the young Mrs. Smith, consented. Seeing that, a very few years afterwards, through an accident on the St. Lawrence River boat on which her husband worked, Mama was suddenly left a young widow with three tiny youngsters to support, her consent that day proved to be one of those things just meant to be.
With the Valentine Stock Company in her home town when only five, Mary played her first part, Cissy in “The Silver King.” In 1902, Mary was already a “star,” playing Jessie in “The Fatal Wedding.” The season of 1904 found Gladys Smith, then twelve years old, playing leading parts, such as Dolly in “The Child Wife,” a play written by Charles Taylor, first husband to Laurette and the father of her two children. The following season Gladys Smith created the part of Freckles in “The Gypsy Girl,” written by Hal Reid, father of the popular and much loved Wallace Reid. Gladys Smith’s salary was then forty dollars per week and she sent her mother, who was living in Brooklyn, fifteen dollars weekly for her support. In 1906 the Smith family toured with Chauncey Olcott in “Edmund Burke.” But it was as the little boy Patsy Poor in “New York Life” that Mary’s chance came for better things.
David Belasco had told Gladys he would give her a hearing. And so the day came when on the dark and empty Stage of the Republic Theatre, a chair her only “support,” Gladys did Patsy’s death scene for Mr. Belasco and he thought so well of it that she was engaged for Charlotte Walker’s younger sister Betty in “The Warrens of Virginia.”
So “The Warrens of Virginia” with Gladys Smith, rechristened by Mr. Belasco “Mary Pickford” (a family name) came and went. The magic wand of Belasco had touched Mary, but magic wands mean little when one needs to eat. “The Warrens of Virginia” finished its run, and Mary, her seventeen years resting heavily upon her, was confronted with the long idle summer and the nearly depleted family exchequer. So arrived the day in the late spring, when from the weary round of agencies and with faint hope of signing early for next season little Mary wandered to the old Biograph studio at 11 East Fourteenth Street.
Such a freshly sweet and pretty little thing she was, that her chances of not being engaged were meagre. Since that day when she first cast her lot with the movies—that day in June, 1909, when the Pickford releases so inauspiciously started, they have continued with only one interruption. That was in January, 1913, when in David Belasco’s production of “The Good Little Devil,” she co-starred with Ernest Truex. What an exciting day at the studio it was when it was discovered that Mr. Belasco was up in the projection room seeing some of Mary’s pictures!
Mary’s return to the legitimate was a clever move. It made for publicity and afterward served her, despite the shortness of the engagement, as a qualification for becoming an Adolph Zukor-Famous Player.