When I came to meet Miss Garden I found the sentiment strikingly reciprocal. Yet on that famous day when I brought Miss Farrar over to the Fort Lee studio to meet her rival I wish that the world might have shared with me the effusiveness of that greeting. Never were two women more glad to see each other. The affectionate cadences of their voices, the profound appreciation of the privilege of this moment expressed by each—these ended at last in a farewell kiss. But the kiss, I discovered later, had worked no psychological change. Both felt exactly the same after the meeting as they had before.
My experience with Miss Garden was costly. It was not, however, so ill-fated as was the Goldwyn Company’s engagement of Maxine Elliott.
With this episode I shall begin my next chapter and shall follow it with the story of Pauline Frederick, the Goldwyn Company’s engagement of Geraldine Farrar, and with my memories of Charlie Chaplin.
Chapter Eleven
MAXINE ELLIOTT AND PAULINE FREDERICK
It was one day just after the Goldwyn Company’s inception that Arch Selwyn and Roi Cooper Megrue came to me in great excitement. “Maxine Elliott’s arriving to-morrow from England,” announced Megrue.
“Yes, Sam,” added Selwyn, “and we think it would be a great thing if you signed up with her. Right this minute the Shuberts are after her for pictures.”
When, a few days later, Miss Elliott came to my office I thought I had never seen a human being more radiantly lovely. When I considered, too, that in addition to this glorious beauty she had a reputation for these looks in every hamlet in America, the one anxiety which assailed me was, Can I possibly get her away from the other fellow? As a matter of fact, I did secure her only after long arduous negotiations.
Never was a picture surrounded by more care than Miss Elliott’s first production. Irvin Cobb and Roi Cooper Megrue wrote the story. Both names should have assured the excellence of the vehicle, Alan Dwan, one of our most celebrated directors, assumed charge of the production. Hugo Ballin, the portrait-painter, designed the sets. In spite of all this perfection of detail, “Fighting Odds” was an abject failure. Never, indeed, was any Goldwyn film criticised so ferociously as this. Not only did we lose on the picture itself, but the “flop” was so conspicuous that it resulted in the cancellation of other pictures of ours.
All this was far from heartening to further performance, yet in the midst of the storm called forth by her first picture Miss Elliott was busy on her second. She was now under the direction of Arthur Hopkins, who, although he had been studying studio methods for some months, had never before assumed full sway of a production. Probably nothing on the screen was more amusing than that inner drama of inexperience and bewilderment revealed in the making of this second picture.