When things had settled into a routine, and on rainy days, we rehearsed and worked out scenarios up in our loft. We also had the costumes delivered there. The loft was always accessible, and we spent many evenings seeing projections and getting our things together for an early morning start.
Across the street from the loft was a famous old eating place, Hoffman’s, where my husband and I dined when we returned late or too weary to dress for the more pretentious hotel dining-room. It was a bit expensive for some of the company, but convenient to our headquarters was one of those market places, indigenous to Los Angeles, where violets and hams commingled on neighborly counters, that served good and inexpensive food on a long white enameled table where guests sat only on one side, on high, spindly stools. It was patronized generously by the actors for breakfast and lunch, when we were working in the downtown studio. Here Mary Pickford and brother Jack and Dorothy West were regular patrons.
While the studio was being put in shape, the members of the company had been scooting about looking for suitable places to live. Salaries were not so large, but that economy had to be practiced, even with the fourteen dollars a week expense money allowed every member of the company.
Mary Pickford had brother Jack to look after, and she decided that if she clubbed in with some of the girls and they all found a place together it would be cheaper, and also not so lonely for her. So Mary, with Jack, and two of the young girls—Dorothy West and Effie Johnson—thirty-dollar-a-weekers, found shelter in a rooming house called “The Lille.” It was on South Olive and Fifth Streets, but it is there no more. The four had rooms here for three and a half per week per person.
But the quartette didn’t stay long at “The Lille”—decided they needed hotel conveniences. So they scurried about and located finally for the winter at the New Broadway Hotel on North Broadway and Second Streets. Here they lived in comfort, if not in style, with two rooms and a connecting bath, for five fifty per week per person.
When we got going, Mr. Griffith was rather glad Jack Smith was along, for with the two companies working we found we could use a small boy quite often. So Jack earned his fifteen a week regularly that first California winter.
The men of the company were all devoted to little Jack. He would sit around nights watching them play poker, sometimes until 3 A.M.; he didn’t want to be forever at the movies with his big sister. Mary allowed Jack fifty cents a night for his dinner; he’d connect up somewhere or other with his pals, in any event with his big brother Dell Henderson, and they would make a night of it.
We were to be no proud owners of an automobile, but rented one by the hour at four dollars for car and chauffeur. The director and his camera man and persons playing leads would travel by motor to location while the others would trolley. As Los Angeles had, even then, the most wonderful system of trolleys in the world, there were few places, no matter how remote, that could not be reached by electric car.
Sunday came to be a big day for the automobile, for on that day we scouted for the week’s locations—that is, after David had made out his weekly expenses, his Sunday morning job.
Here is a sample, recorded in almost illegible pen-and-ink longhand: