These little happenings were encouraging. Intelligent persons on the outside were taking interest. So again we’d buck up and go at the movie job with renewed vigor.
For a time we lived in the clouds—our habitat a mountain peak. But that couldn’t last. No kind of mountain peak existence could. We should have known. Even after all the encouragement, down off our peak we’d slip into the deep dark valley again.
We tried to keep an unswerving faith, but who could have visioned the great things that were to come? Doubts still persisted. Yes, even after the Browning triumph, longings came over us to return to former ambitions. They had not been buried so deeply after all. We’d see a fine play and get the blue devils. In this mood my husband would do the rounds of the movie houses and chancing upon a lot of bad pictures, come back utterly discouraged.
“They can’t last. I give them a few years. Where’s my play? Since I went into these movies I haven’t had a minute to look at a thing I ever wrote. And I went into them because I thought surely I’d get time to write or do something with what I had.” (Monetary needs so soon forgotten!) “Well, anyhow, nobody’s going to know I ever did this sort of thing when I’m a famous playwright. Nobody’s ever going to know that David W. Griffith, the playwright, was once the Lawrence Griffith of the movies.”
So “Lawrence” continued on the next Biograph contract. The two names would get all balled up sometimes and I’d get peeved and say: “Why don’t you use your right name? I think you’re so silly.”
But David remained obdurate until he signed his third Biograph contract.
CHAPTER XVIII
GETTING ON
One thing was sure—the pictures were making money. The percentage told that story. What a thrill we got at the first peek at the royalty check each month. Made us nervous. Where were we headed? Sometimes we almost wished that financially we were not succeeding so well, for then we would have quitted the movies. But wouldn’t that have been a crazy thing to do? A year of fifty-two working weeks? At the rate we were going, we could keep at it for three years, and quit with twelve thousand in the bank, then David could write plays and realize his youthful ambition.
We lived simply. When the royalty check before the end of the second year amounted to nine hundred and a thousand a month, we still maintained a thirty-five-dollar-a-month apartment. Never dreamed of getting stylish. No time for it. So each month there was a nice little roll to bank, and it was put right into the Bowery Savings Bank. The only trouble with a savings bank was they wouldn’t accept more than three thousand dollars, so we secured a list of them and I went the rounds depositing honest movie money with a rapidity quite unbelievable.
