American Lightning Page 6

  TEN

  ______________________

  IN NEW YORK the news of the disaster in Los Angeles continued to fill the front pages. Five days later the New York Times reported that bodies were still being removed from the charred rubble. The National Association of Manufacturers met that first week of October in Manhattan and sent Otis a telegram urging him to continue to battle “for industrial freedom.” At a large, boisterous rally on Union Square speakers speculated that the explosion might have been an accident, “caused by gas, which several in the building smelled during the evening.” While on nearby Fourteenth Street, D.W. already had Los Angeles on his troubled mind.

  His troupe would be leaving for California in six weeks. Only now they would be forced to make the trip without the director’s favorite leading lady. The “Biograph Girl,” as audiences had taken to calling her, the country’s first genuine movie star, had abruptly left the company. Mary Pickford had sailed to Cuba with her new husband to shoot movies for Carl Laemmle’s Independent Motion Picture company.

  D.W. felt not just disappointed but betrayed. Mary—born Gladys Smith—had walked into the Biograph studio as an accomplished teenage stage actress, but D.W. always believed he had discovered her. In his director’s mind, she was his creation. He had been the first to understand the engaging power that Mary’s tender, wonderfully expressive face would have on the big screen.

  It had been a warm May morning in 1909 when sixteen-year-old Mary, as she would remember it, “belligerently . . . marched up the steps of Biograph” for the first time. With the family short of funds, and no new play on Mary’s schedule, her mother had insisted that she audition for a role in the movies. Reluctantly Mary obeyed. “I was disappointed in Mother: permitting a Belasco actress, and her own daughter at that, to go into one of those despised, cheap, loathsome motion-picture studios.”

  Mary took a seat in a corner near the door, deliberately tucking herself away as if trying to hide. She was wearing a blue-and-white-striped dress and a rolled-brim straw sailor hat with a dark blue ribbon. Short golden curls bobbed around a fresh, angelic face. Her large hazel eyes shined magically. She looked not more than fourteen, but there was a maturity and confidence in her controlled demeanor. Despite her efforts to remain aloof, it did not take her long to get noticed. In the dressing room, the actors who had been playing craps starting talking.

  “There’s a cute kid outside. Have you seen her?”

  “No. Where is she?”

  “She’s been sitting out there in a corner by herself.”

  Bobby Harron, the prop boy, told D.W. about the “good looker” who had the actors buzzing. Curious, the director went downstairs to see.

  D.W. looked at her appraisingly. It was, Mary felt, “a manner that was too jaunty and familiar.” But the director was intrigued. “She was small—cute figure—much golden curls—creamy complexion—sparkling Irish eyes, but eyes that also had languorous capabilities.”

  He decided to give her a screen test. In the basement dressing room, Mary was handed a costume. D.W. thought the young girl might be right for Pippa in Pippa Passes, the Browning poem he was hoping to shoot later that summer. He applied the makeup himself, asking about her theatrical experience as he worked. His manner was professional, yet Mary could not help feeling there was something intimate and presumptuous in his touch. He was “a pompous and insufferable creature” and she “wanted more than ever to escape.”

  But Mary was led to the top-floor ballroom studio, presented with a guitar, and D.W. instructed her to pretend to play it. Without further preliminaries, the camera started rolling. Owen Moore, the troupe’s rakish leading man, walked onto the set. He took one long look at Mary and in his lilting, musical voice wondered, “Who’s the dame?”

  Mary was shocked. She was not accustomed to being referred to in such a vulgar manner, and she began to admonish Moore.

  D.W. cut her off. “Never, do you hear, never stop in the middle of a scene. Do you know how much film costs per foot? You ruined it! Start from the beginning!”

  Mary bristled at the reprimand, but she began again from the top. When she finished, she was convinced she had brought nothing to the scene. She returned to the basement dressing room and changed into her blue and white dress, certain she would never again enter the Biograph Studio. But D.W. was waiting for her.

  “Will you dine with me?” the director asked.

  He was old enough to be her father! Besides, Mary had never been out on a date. She curtly refused.

  D.W. was not put off. He told her to come back tomorrow, and he offered the studio’s standard fee, five dollars a day.

  “I’m a Belasco actress, Mr. Griffith, and I must have ten.”

  D.W. laughed. “Agreed! Five dollars for today and ten for tomorrow. But keep it to yourself. No one is paid that much, and there will be a riot if it leaks out.” And he insisted on walking her to the subway, doing his best to hold his umbrella over her golden curls as a late-afternoon spring rainstorm pelted New York.

  From their first encounter, D.W., in his direct, instinctive way, had been attracted to Mary as a woman, and as a screen actress. And Mary, shrewd and pragmatic, had been willing to learn from D.W., and manipulate him.

  The next day Mary began her film career, playing the pretty daughter in The Violin Maker of Cremona. It screened later that week in the brownstone’s second-floor bedroom, which had been converted into a projection room. The reaction, according to D.W.’s wife, was unanimous: “The studio bunch was all agog over the picture and the new girl.”

  Mary quickly became D.W.’s favorite, and he used her often. The camera would focus on Mary, and her desires, instincts, impulses, and thoughts seemed bared on the screen for the audience to see. Her versatility was also unique. She could be cast in roles beyond her years, in comedies or melodramas, as a scrubwoman or a society woman, an Indian squaw or a choir girl.

  Movies were new to Mary, but they were also new to D.W. With discipline, spontaneity, and a good deal of squabbling, they worked together to expand the medium’s artistic possibilities. They were pioneers, and they fed off each other’s instincts and experimentations.

  Mary, for example, thought the elaborate screen gestures used by the other actors were too exaggerated, more like pantomimes. She conducted herself on screen with a stage actress’s subtlety and control. At first D.W. threatened to fire her unless she gave more histrionic performances. But after he watched her on the screen, he came around to embracing her realistic acting style. It was, he realized, more suitable for the stories he wanted to tell. It made them more believable.

  Yet D.W., too, had his own expectations for a performance. While filming the climax of To Save Her Soul, when the villain waves a revolver at Mary, D.W. became annoyed. Mary was not showing sufficient fear.

  He rushed onto the set, grabbed Mary by the shoulders, and shook her violently. “I’ll show you how to do this thing!” he shouted. “Get some feeling into you, damn it! You’re like a piece of wood.”

  Without thinking, Mary bit him on the hand. “What gave you the right to lay your hands on me?” she shouted. Then she stormed from the set.

  Shaking, raging, Mary was walking down East Fourteenth Street when D.W. caught up with her.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “You must forgive me. I know you can do that scene. Let’s try once more.”

  D.W. led her back to the studio. He didn’t bother with a rehearsal.

  “Come on, now,” the director instructed. “Let me see the real Pickford! I know you can do it!”

  The experience, the fight with D.W., had left Mary seething with emotion. Now she trembled at the sight of the gun and tears rushed down her face. Her fear was palpable. The scene played out perfectly. And D.W. had learned an important lesson about the efficacy of a director’s belligerent authority.

  Mary’s magnificent face, and the many animated masks she could put on at will, encouraged D.W. to try new things. “Come on, Billy,” the director order
ed his cameraman late in the afternoon while they were shooting Friends, “let’s have some fun. Move the camera up, and let’s get closer to Mary.”

  It was a startling suggestion. But Billy Blizter carried the unwieldy one-hundred-pound camera forward and took the shot.

  It was the first close-up in the history of pictures. They viewed it that evening in the Biograph projection room.

  “Pickford, what do you think?” asked D.W.

  At first Mary had been disconcerted by the sight of her own face magnified on the screen. But she quickly grasped that such shots could be effectively used to communicate emotions. “I think you’ll do more of that, Mr. Griffith. Maybe even closer.”

  “You’re right, but something’s wrong with the makeup. Can you tell me?”

  “I think there’s too much eyebrow pencil and shadowing around my eyes.”

  “You’re right, Pickford.”

  In such a collaborative fashion, they made movies and invented an art.

  Working with D.W., Mary became the first movie star. The films gave no screen credits, and none of the players’ names were ever mentioned in advertisements, but that did not matter. Audiences recognized her face. They called her “Goldilocks” or “The Girl With the Curls.” Mostly, though, she was known as “The Biograph Girl.”

  Fan letters arrived at the Fourteenth Street brownstone. “You know,” a surprised yet impressed D.W. told his wife, “we are getting as many as twenty-five letters a day about Mary Pickford.”

  “Why, what do you mean, letters about her?”

  “Every picture she plays in brings a bunch of mail asking her name and other things about her.”

  “You’re not kidding?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Did you tell her?”

  “No. I don’t want her asking for a raise in salary.”

  But D.W. did not need to tell Mary. She would walk down Fourteenth Street or ride on the subway to her home in Brooklyn, and people would recognize her. It was not just gratifying; it was exciting. Mary, shrewdly, began to realize that her growing celebrity brought with it a commercial power. Audiences were going to theaters and nickelodeons to see her. She deserved a larger share of the money that was pouring in.

  She was already imagining a more glorious future. “Someday I am going to be a great actress and have my name in electric lights over a theater,” she said with complete assurance to a group of Biograph actors over dinner at Cavanagh’s on East 23rd Street. She had a vision of the movie star, the American idol, she would become. But Mary also understood that to achieve such transforming fame, she would need to burst out of D.W.’s controlling, and often patronizing, grasp.

  They argued, ostensibly about money. Mary was earning $100 a week in the fall of 1910 when Carl Laemmle’s Independent Motion Picture company (IMP) offered her $175. D.W. refused to budge. And IMP also promised to display her name in theaters. D.W.’s own name was not credited; he would not allow one of his players to gain recognition that was denied to him.

  But the roots of the breakup ran deeper. Mary felt her talents and her celebrity were constrained by D.W. At Biograph, he was the star. Now she could become one.

  After Mary left, D.W. went around the studio like a man in mourning. He would need to find another ingenue to replace her for the trip to Los Angeles. In the meantime, he would focus on scenarios that featured older, more mature women. But with Mary’s absence, he began to examine the nature of the attentions he had rained on her. His thoughts remained unarticulated, yet they were a torment. They pounded through his consciousness with the force of a compulsion. Mary, the teenager who looked young enough to be his virginal daughter, was the embodiment of deeper desires. D.W. was drawn to attractive young girls. He needed them in his films, and in his life. The prospect of being in California without Mary left him deadened. His only comfort was the hope that someday she would return to his troupe, and to him.

  ELEVEN

  ______________________

  THAT FALL DARROW’S life, too, had its secrets. Of course, a woman was involved. He had returned to Chicago with a practical vision of his future and quickly set to work. He ignored the many calls that arrived from all over the country begging him to rush to the defense of one after another victimized populist hero. Instead, he stayed close to home, lending his name to a few local causes but devoting most of his time and practice to well-paid tasks for the Chicago Title and Trust Company. At nights, rather than the swirl of earnest political meetings that had been so much a part of his previous life, he returned home to his wife Ruby. He tried to find comfort in her companionship, familiarity, and stability. In Los Angeles Darrow had come close enough to death to resign himself to its ineluctable pull. When to his great astonishment he was granted a reprieve, he vowed to take advantage of this second chance. He would live a more reasonable and settled existence. Only this too, he came to discover, was a sort of death. He realized this when he fell in love.

  Mary Field was a woman of immense vitality and she channeled her intensity and passion into the great causes of her times. She had come to Chicago from her native Detroit because she wanted to help integrate the flood of recently arrived immigrants into the American Experience. She found work and a home at the Maxwell Street Settlement and was drawn into the impoverished lives and socialist politics of the city’s Russian-Jewish immigrants. Their oppression, first by the czars and then by the Chicago police, became hers; and as she absorbed their experiences, she was further radicalized.

  She met Darrow in the spring of 1909 at a rally to protest the extradition to Russia of Christian Rudowitz, a czarist dissident. The crowd was large and dangerous; Rudowitz’s deportation, they knew, would ensure his death. When Darrow spoke, his words offered hope and the possibility of a legal solution. The crowd at once grew silent and attentive. Field, too, was swept up in Darrow’s oration. She was certain of the deep well of his commitment. He was the sort of man it would be an honor to love. Emboldened, she introduced herself to the famous attorney after the rally.

  Darrow shook hands with a short, tiny actually, dark-brown-haired thirty-year-old woman. She had a firm handshake and a steady smile. It was a candid greeting, and Darrow understood its implicit invitation. Did he try to resist? Perhaps. But his life had grown tedious. He suffered from a malaise more painful than the sickness that had previously brought him to despair: death without dying. In time, inevitably, Mary became his lover.

  He called her Molly, and she called him Darrow. He was more than twenty years her senior, celebrated and accomplished, but it was Molly who controlled the relationship. Her ideals, her expectations, prodded Darrow. To her, he was unique, one of those rare individuals “who have loved and served their fellow men with sincerity of heart.” Darrow, weary after fighting for so many causes, tried to find the energy and the clarity of purpose to be the man she saw in him. Her faith aroused him. They talked about Tolstoy, read poetry aloud. At night she would unpin her long, dark hair, and her heavy tresses would cascade down the pillow and fall around the two of them, hiding the couple away in a secret world.

  _____

  But guilt ate at Darrow. He was betraying Ruby, and, he came around to conceding to himself, he was also betraying Mary. He could not leave Ruby; she was the anchor that weighed him down, yet at the same time she kept him moored. And if he wasn’t going to marry his Molly, what would become of her? She was young, and she needed to make her own life unencumbered by a middle-aged married man.

  Their parting was a sadness. It would not do for her to remain in Chicago; proximity would bring memories and new temptations. Darrow gave her some money and wrote a letter of introduction to his friend Theodore Dreiser. The author, after the negligible sales of his first book, Sister Carrie, was now editing a women’s magazine, The Delineator. Molly went off to New York with the hope of becoming a writer.

  The week of the explosion in Los Angeles, Mary’s first article appeared in The Delineator. Dreiser was enthusiastic, and other edi
tors noticed the piece, too. John Phillips, at America Magazine, wrote her: “That piece of yours in the The Delineator was a beautiful thing . . . and I may tell you that it is only now and then that I feel envious of what I see in other magazines.” Her pieces started appearing in America, too.

  Darrow was impressed and a little surprised. “You have gone so far I can’t see you anymore,” he wrote her. And he missed his Molly. “No one else,” Darrow told her in another of his ardent letters, “is so bright and clear and sympathetic to say nothing of sweet and dear.” “Am tired and hungry and wish you were here to eat and drink with me and talk to me with your low, sweet, kind, sympathetic voice.”

  He told her that he would come to New York to see her. He planned to move there so that they could be together.

  But even as Darrow wrote those words, he was not convinced. He could not leave Ruby, and the prospect of his being with Molly again was, he knew, simply an old man’s wishful thinking. His life would have to go on without any feelings of love.

  As Darrow resigned himself to the vast unhappiness of his stolid life in the Midwest, a life without Molly, as D.W. traveled to Los Angeles wrestling with his own ambitions and demons, a telegram arrived at the Burns Detective Agency in Chicago.

  In Los Angeles, Billy Burns had examined the suitcase bomb that had been found in the shrubbery outside Felix Zeehandelaar’s house. A New Haven Clock Company alarm clock and a No. 5 Columbia dry battery were fastened by a copper wire to a small board. One piece of brass had been soldered to the alarm key on the clock, and another was fastened by a screw and a bolt to the board. These were the two contact points. When the alarm rang, the current would shoot from the clock to the battery and ignite the dynamite. It was a simple but lethal device. The explosion would have been devastating.