“Mary, you haven’t forgotten how we used to strike bargains with the salesman at Hearn’s on Fourteenth Street, have you?”
“Oh,” said Mary, quickly coming back to earth and proving greatness but a dream, “wasn’t it fun? Let’s go over to the Astor and have tea.”
Across from Macy’s, Mary’s first bus was parked and young brother Jack was chauffing. When we hopped into the car, we found a very disgruntled youth who, having waited longer than he thought he ought to have, gave me a stony stare and never spoke a word. As far as young Jack Smith was concerned, I’d never been on earth before.
We wondered about Mack Sennett. Would he ever buy a girl an ice cream soda? Marion Leonard said it would be his birthday if he ever did. But the day arrived when Mack Sennett did open up. He bought a seventy-five-dollar diamond necklace for Mabel Normand, and then after some misunderstanding between himself and Mabel, proving he had a head for business, he offered it to different members of the company for eighty-five dollars.
Spike Robinson, who used to box with Mr. Griffith and who now boxes with Douglas Fairbanks, looms up as the one generous member of the company, being willing always to buy the girls ice cream sodas or lemonade or sarsaparilla—the refreshments of our age of innocence.
* * * * *
The fall of 1909 brought to the studio a number of new women who proved valuable additions to our company. Stephanie Longfellow, who was a bona fide niece of the poet Henry, was one of them. Her first pictures were released in August. They were “The Better Way” and “A Strange Meeting.” Miss Longfellow was quite a different type from her predecessors and her work was delightful. She was a refreshing personality with unusual mental attainments. “She’s a lady,” said the director. Some ten years ago Miss Longfellow retired to domestic life via a happy marriage outside the profession.
Handsome Mrs. Grace Henderson became our grande dame of quality, breezing in from past glories of “Peter Pan” (having played Peter’s Mother) and of the famous old Daly Stock Company.
Another grande dame of appearance distinguished, drawing modest pay checks occasionally, and with a cultural family background most unusual for a stage mother, was Caroline Harris. Miss Harris, otherwise Mrs. Barthelmess, and mother of ten-year-old Dicky Barthelmess, was one stage mother not supported by her child. Only when home on a vacation from military school did Dicky work in a picture. He made his début with Mrs. Tom Ince, and his little heart was quite broken when he discovered his only scene had been cut out.
Miss Harris’s first stage appearance had been with Benjamin Chapin playing Mrs. Lincoln in “Lincoln at the White House,” afterwards called “Honest Abe.” Her first part in the movies was in De Maupassant’s “The Necklace,” in which Rose King played the lead. Miss Harris had learned of the Biograph through a girl who jobbed at the studio, Helen Ormsby, the daughter of a Brooklyn newspaper man.