“Now that’s the kind of girl I’m looking for,” said Mr. Griffith.
Mr. Webb answered: “Well, why not speak to her? She’s an actress, you can bet your hat on that.”
But the movie director having a certain position to maintain, and not wanting to be misunderstood, hesitated. Mr. Webb volunteered, stepped up to and asked the girl would she like to work in a moving picture. Prompt her reply, “Oh, I’d love to, I just love pictures.” The “girl” was Marion Sunshine of the then vaudeville team of Sunshine and Tempest. She was quite a famous personality to be in Biograph movies at this time.
Now Austin Webb, who during David Griffith’s movie acting days had loaned him his own grand wardrobe, was one who might have become a big movie star. David implored him to try it, but he was skeptical. It took sporting blood to plunge moviewards in the crude days of our beginnings. Who could tell which way the thing would flop?
CHAPTER XVI
CUDDEBACKVILLE
I was not one of the select few who made the first trip to Cuddebackville, New York. I had been slated for a visit to my husband’s folks in Louisville, Kentucky, and while there this alluring adventure was slipped over on me.
A new picture was being started out at Greenwich, Connecticut, at Commodore Benedict’s, the day I was leaving, and as I was taking a late train, I was invited out on a farewell visit, as it were.
The picture was “The Golden Supper,” taken from Tennyson’s “Lover’s Tale.” I arrived just in time for the Princess’s royal funeral. Down the majestic stairway of the Commodore’s palatial home, the cortège took its way, escorting on a flower-bedecked stretcher, in all her pallid beauty, the earthly remains of the dead little princess.
Now in the movies, if anywhere, a princess must be beautiful. I knew not who was playing this fair royal child until the actors put the bier down, and the princess sat up, when I was quite dumbfounded to see our own little Dorothy West come to life.
Dorothy had done nicely times before as a little child of the ghetto and as frail Italian maids of the peasant class, and now here she was a full-fledged princess. So, in my amazement, I said to my husband, for it was a sincere, impersonal interest in the matter that I felt: “Is Dorothy West playing the Princess? Aren’t you taking a chance?” With great assurance he answered, “Oh, with the photography we now have, I can make them all beautiful.”