How we did buzz around, those last weeks in New York! Mr. Powell’s company worked nights to keep up the two one-thousand-foot releases per week.
News was already being broadcast that it was quite O.K. down at the Biograph if you got in right—that they were doing good things and were going to send a company to California for the winter, which would mean a regular salary for the time away.
And so arrived Mr. Dell Henderson, who became leading man for the night company at five per night. The demands for physical beauty that he had to fulfil certainly should have earned more than the ordinary five. He had to be so handsome that his jealous wife prevails upon thugs to waylay him and scar for life his manly beauty so that the admiring women will let him alone.
This movie, “The Love of Lady Irma,” was one of the first pictures Mr. Powell directed. Florence Barker, who became the leading woman for the No. 2 California Comedy Company, played Lady Irma, the jealous wife. She had joined the company in December, her first picture being “The Dancing Girl of Butte,” in which she was cast with Owen Moore and Mack Sennett.
It was in these days that Eleanor Kershaw did her bit; also Dorothy West and Ruth Hart. Miss Hart, now Mrs. Victor Moore and the mother of two children, played the sweet domestic wife, a rôle Mr. Griffith felt she was a good exponent of, and which she has successfully continued in her private life.
Frank Grandin appears in his first leading part, playing The Duke in “The Duke’s Plan”; and our atmospheric genial Englishman, Charles Craig, affiliated the same month, playing opposite Mary Pickford in “The Englishman and the Girl.”
The studio was now a busy place. A Civil War picture had to be rushed through before we could get away. Mr. Powell was busy engaging actors for it and had just completed his cast of principals when he bumped into an actor friend, Tommy Ince. It seems Mr. Ince at the moment was “broke.” Apologetically, Mr. Powell said he couldn’t offer anything much, but if Mr. Ince didn’t mind coming in as an “extra” he would give him ten dollars for the day. This quite overcame Tom Ince and he stammered forth, “Glory be”—or words to that effect—“I’d be glad to get five.” Only one part did Tom Ince play with Biograph and that was in “The New Lid” with Lucille Lee Stewart, Ralph Ince’s wife and sister of Anita Stewart.
I happened to call on Eleanor Hicks Powell one evening in the summer of 1912 when our only Biograph baby, Baden Powell, had reached the creeping age. During the evening Mr. and Mrs. Tom Ince dropped in. Of course, we talked “movies.” Mr. Ince was worrying about an offer he’d had to go to California as manager and leading director of the 101 Ranch, Kaybee Company, for one hundred and twenty-five dollars per week, as I remember. He offered me forty dollars to go out as leading woman, but I couldn’t see the Indians. Mr. Ince couldn’t see them either—but it was the best offer that had come his way.
Mr. Ince made a great success out of the 101 Ranch, but having ambitions to do the “high-class,” he moved on in quest of it. Took to developing stars like Charles Ray, Enid Markey, and Dorothy Dalton; became one of the Triangle outfit with David Griffith and Mack Sennett; exploited dramatic stars like George Beban, Billie Burke, and Enid Bennett; did “Civilization”—but after “The Birth of a Nation.”
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