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With the full sense of that evening’s significance, I went to the opening of “Thais” at the Strand Theatre in New York. A woman friend of mine went with me and as we walked out of the theatre her face told me everything. “Oh,” she said, her eyes filling with tears, “I just hate to tell you—knowing how much it means to you—but—well, you can see for yourself how they took it.”
I had indeed seen it—the heart-breaking coldness with which that first New York audience had received the picture on which I had staked so much. Even then, however, I did not realise the enormity of the failure. I did this only when a day or so later telegrams began pouring in from cities all over the country where “Thais” had appeared simultaneously with New York. These telegrams rendered, with few exceptions, the same verdict as the metropolis. Nor were foreign countries more enthusiastic.
Miss Garden herself was quite as overwhelmed by this failure as was the company. It had certainly been through no lack of diligence on her part that the story went as it did, for she had arrived at the studio early each morning and was often the last to leave it.
Certainly we were most unwise in selecting for her first picture a story in which her operatic tradition was so ingrained. This was brought out by the comparative success of her second film, “The Splendid Sinner.” Had this only been produced first we should have done on it three or four times the business which we actually did. As it was, “Thais” had been such a complete “flop” that exhibitors had their fingers crossed when it came to Mary Garden.
The Garden experience cost the Goldwyn Company heavily. Disastrous as it was, however, it did not compare with the two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar contract which the Famous Players-Lasky organization made with the late Caruso. I was at Graumann’s Theatre in Los Angeles when the first of the two pictures involved in this contract was released, and its reception was even more virulent than that accorded “Thais.” After playing two days it was, in fact, hissed off the stage. What was more, this experience was echoed all over the country. Nor was a rival’s venture with the beautiful Lina Cavalieri more productive of confidence in the wisdom of transplanting the operatic star to the screen firmament.
Aside from the unfamiliarity of the stage and operatic star with the medium of motion-pictures, a difficulty enhanced by the arrogance with which they usually approach the new field, there is another fundamental obstruction in the path of the film-producer who exploits them. Although their names may be on the lips of every inhabitant of a large city, many a small town knows them not. Main Street, which counts enormously in pictures, is apt to be much more familiar with some comparatively obscure film actress than with Farrar or Garden. This fact was brought home to me when, some months after signing my contract with Miss Garden, I was talking with a small-town exhibitor who had come with his lawyer to see me about signing a contract for Goldwyn films.
“Ah,” remarked the lawyer, looking at some photographs on my desk, “I see you have engaged Mary Garden. That ought to be a great card.”
“Mary Garden!” exclaimed the exhibitor at this point. “Why, what’s new about her. I showed her five years ago and charged five cents admission.” Evidently he had confused the prima donna with Mary Gardner, a screen actress.
One of the incidents which stands out from that Winter in the Fort Lee studio was the meeting which I effected between Mary Garden and Geraldine Farrar. The two rivals had never been introduced. But neither apparently had found acquaintance necessary to the formation of a firm opinion. In the days when Miss Farrar used to be working in the Lasky studio I would sometimes talk to her while De Mille was taking other scenes. The conversation usually drifted toward people, and its current bore us almost inevitably to Mary Garden. It was quite patent, however, that the fascination which this theme seemed to possess for Geraldine was that of professional rivalry, which always exists, and the greater the prima donnas the more vehement the feeling.