Who was to go to California and who wasn’t? Ah, that was the question! Some husbands didn’t care to leave their wives, and as they couldn’t afford to take them, they were out. Some didn’t mind the separation. Some of the women had ties; if not husbands, mothers; and the California salary would not be big enough to keep up two homes. Some didn’t want to leave New York; and some who should have known they didn’t have a ghost of a chance wept sad and plentiful tears whenever the director looked their way. One of these was Jeanie Macpherson. Jeanie didn’t go along this first time.
A few days after Christmas was the time of the first hegira to the land of the eucalyptus and the pepper tree. It was a big day.
We were going to Los Angeles to take moving pictures, and Hollywood didn’t mean a thing. Pasadena the company knew about. Like Palm Beach, it was where millionaires sojourned for two months during the Eastern winter. San Gabriel Mission they’d seen photos of, and counted on using it in pictures. They understood there were many beaches accessible by trolley; and residential districts like West Adams; even Figueroa, the home of Los Angeles’s first millionaires, was a fine avenue then; and Westlake and Eastlake Parks which were quite in town. But they didn’t know Edendale from the Old Soldiers’ Home at Sawtelle. San Pedro? Yes, that was where the steamers arrived from San Francisco. San Fernando? Well, yes, there was a Mission there too, but it was rather far away, and right in the heart of a parched and cactus-covered desert. Mt. Lowe was easy—there was the incline railway to help us to the top.
Four luxurious days on luxurious trains before we would sight the palms and poinsettias that were gaily beckoning to us across the distances.
Let us away!
The company departed via the Black Diamond Express on the Lehigh Valley, which route meant ferry to Jersey City. A late arrival in Chicago allowed just comfortable time to make the California Limited leaving at 8 P.M.
The company was luxurious for but three days.
It was only Mr. R. H. Hammer, my husband, and myself who had been allotted four full days of elegance. We de luxe’d out of New York via the Twentieth Century Limited. I had come into my own.
Mr. Powell was in charge of the company and so he checked them off on arrival at the ferry—Marion Leonard, Florence Barker, Mary Pickford, Dorothy West, Kate Bruce, the women; George Nichols, Henry Walthall, Billy Quirk, Frank Grandin, Charlie West, Mack Sennett, Dell Henderson, Arthur Johnson, Daddy Butler, Christie Miller, Tony O’Sullivan, and Alfred Paget, the men. There were three wives who were actresses also, Eleanor Hicks, Florence Lee (Mrs. Dell Henderson), and Mrs. George Nichols. And there were two camera men, Billy Bitzer and Arthur Marvin; a scenic artist, Eddie Shelter; a carpenter or two, and two property boys, Bobbie Harron and Johnny Mahr.
No theatrical job had come along for Mary Pickford, and the few summer months she had intended spending in “the pictures” would lengthen into a full year now that she had decided to go with us to California. Her salary was still small: it was about forty dollars a week at this time.