Naturally it was “Thais,” the most widely known of her operatic rôles, which suggested itself as her first vehicle. This story, although uncopyrighted in America, obligated the purchase of foreign rights, and I paid M. Anatole France, its author, ten thousand dollars for these. In so doing I felt sure that the French exhibitors alone would more than return my expenditure. Just how little this belief was realised is brought out by the conclusion of this episode.
No sooner had the actual production of “Thais” begun than I was beset by grave fears. Miss Garden, feeling rightfully that her operatic presentation of the rôle was authoritative, did not recognise the difference of medium involved, and her first days on the set showed her, as the studio people expressed it, “acting all over the place.” That which was art in opera was not art on the screen, where the secret of achievement is emotional restraint. Watch Charlie Chaplin, the great exponent of motion-picture art, and you will see that he gets his effects by suggesting rather than by presenting an emotion.
Those days when we were producing “Thais” remain with me as among the most troubled of my history. Harassed by financial adjustments and by production difficulties, assailed by complaints of scenarios and directors from my various stars, I now had this supreme anxiety regarding the outcome of my enormous investment in Mary Garden. Indeed, I was constantly called upon to mediate between the singer and her director.
The death of “Thais” was almost the death of Mary Garden. She had fought bitterly the scenario’s departure from the original text here in this scene. She asserted that the screen version, presenting as it did the triumph of Thais, the woman, over Thais, the saint, was an intolerable falsification. And she could, indeed, hardly be persuaded to act in it at all.
When she saw the rushes of this scene, which so violated her artistic conception, her rage and grief knew no bounds. “I knew it!” she cried. “Oh, I knew it! Imagine me, the great Thais, dying like an acrobat!”
A moment later she rushed from the projection-room down to the office. Here she found Margaret Mayo. “Did you see it,” she stormed to this other woman. “That terrible thing? Did you see the way they made me die? Imagine a saint dying like that!”
The actress looked her up and down and then she responded in a tone of studied insolence, “You would have a hard time, Miss Garden, proving to any one that you were a saint.”
Some time later when I came up on the set I found Miss Garden weeping hysterically. “Oh,” said she, “that terrible woman! Have you heard what she just said to me.”
Miss Garden never forgave this gratuitous insult.
At last, after such stormy sessions, “Thais” was completed. The finished picture was not reassuring. But, even though I recognised its shortcomings, I still hoped that Mary Garden’s name would carry the production to triumph. If it went over it meant a lift from the deep trough of the sea in which the Goldwyn Company had been weltering. If it failed—but I did not dare allow myself to dwell upon this.