Life and Lillian Gish

“Yes, I have written, from time to time, about the pictures. Not long ago I did an article for Oliver Sayler’s book, ‘Revolt in the Arts,’ and I did one on ‘Motion Pictures,’ for the Encyclopaedia Britannica. They sent me a check, which I have kept as a souvenir. It was for twenty-one dollars.”

She told me some of the happenings of her childhood, half pathetic, amusing things, over which one hardly knew whether to laugh or weep. I was not surprised to find that she had a happy, delicate sense of humor—I have yet to meet anyone worthwhile without it.

She spoke of Mark Twain—of her love for his work, especially “Huckleberry Finn.” Later, of “Mickey Mouse”: “I could see an entire show of nothing else.”

She spoke of her mother, her early hardships, her final break. “All those years of struggle and privation had to be paid for; her capital of health and strength were exhausted, utterly.”

Her face, in the fading light, reflected from the river, took on an added unreality.

“This is my favorite part of the day,” she said, and it came to me that her remark, and the manner of it, removed her a step farther from her surroundings: that she was, in fact, of Arcady.

IV

WORKING WITH LILLIAN

“Uncle Vanya” was to reopen in New York for two weeks at the Booth Theatre, then it was going on the road—to Boston, to Chicago, to Pittsburgh, to Philadelphia. There would be rehearsals, but we should have a good deal of time to work, she said, and would I like to come again tomorrow? It would be nearly four weeks until she left for Boston. We could make a good start.

We worked the next day, and the next, and were to have worked on Sunday, but she was ill when I arrived, and I saw her only briefly, her face flushed with fever, a light attack of “grippe.” On that day, I first met that rare woman, her mother, sweet and patient, her face like a miniature, her hands the daintiest in the world. And then, a few days later, that princess of comediennes, light-hearted Dorothy, “a bright flag flying in the breeze,” to whom all the days are good days, all music good music, to whom all clouds are lined with silver and spanned with rainbows. The likeness between the sisters, whatever it had been earlier, was hardly more now than a family suggestion that flashed faintly at long intervals. They were, in fact, about as different as it is possible for sisters to be.

Daily we rebuilt the sequence of the years—for Lillian a new occupation which she entered into with zest. As I have told earlier her “den” had a wide window that overlooked the East River—a cozy room, with small low chairs which she loved—a proper setting for her. We almost always worked there. It is associated with these pages.

Her memory of earlier happenings was vague. We relied a good deal upon Dorothy, always in childhood with her mother, who had kept her memories refreshed. To Lillian, those days of wandering had been one like another—little to look forward to, less to look back upon—mere links in a succession of one-night stands. Memory and anticipation do not prosper on that nourishment.

She typified the present. The moment it became the past, it was blurred—sometimes obliterated. Her interest in tomorrow lay chiefly in the fact that directly it was to become today. She examined it, she took it to pieces, in order that she might more substantially rebuild it. Dreams of a radiant, far-off possibility, interested her but meagerly. She had grown up without them, or had grown out of the habit of them and did not miss them any more. I think of her today as a slender figure, walking through a field of ripening grain, that parts before her, and closes behind her as she passes along. Her interest in life lies in the beautiful, exquisite things not far away, and in the welfare of those about her. She moves steadily forward, her feet firmly set. She is without envy, or malice, and totally without curiosity. She is, as I have suggested, apt to forget, but it is never safe to count on her doing so: More than once I have known her to treasure up some casual, inconsidered remark, and recall it one day to my undoing.

She was always in quiet good humor, but almost never gay. The spirit of banter, so riot in Dorothy, was in Lillian altogether lacking. I remember Dorothy saying to me: “Couldn’t you find a cigarette holder more complicated than that one?” A remark as foreign to Lillian as toe dancing.

Yet her words not infrequently took a quaint turn. Speaking of the many demands for money that came to her, she once said:

“Three hundred dollars is the amount they usually want to borrow. Sometimes they pay it back—a little of it—when it is three hundred. When it is five hundred, it is a gift—they don’t pay any of it.”

And I recall her saying: “Jazz is America’s challenge to the world.” And again: “The Guild Theatre looks like a library gone wrong.” She certainly made no effort to say such things, and when she did, apparently did not notice them at all, and would not have remembered them a moment afterward. But they were often quite unexpectedly on her tongue.

A mystic herself, she believed in mystical things—in telepathy, in foreknowledge, in visions, in Christian healing. I have already spoken of her visit to the Miracle Girl of Konnersreuth, and there was a time, chiefly on her mother’s account, when she devoted herself to Christian Science,—mind healing, and the like. I was sure she believed in the efficacy of prayer, though perhaps could not give any clear reason for it, beyond the general theory that spiritual and physical harmony might thus be restored. Certainly she was not orthodox, and I was by no means sure that she was not a pagan—a Sun-, a tree-, a flower-worshipper—that would be natural, and proper, for a dryad.

“What is your idea of God?” I asked, one day.

“Force, creative power.” A moment later, she added: “The cloud, the sunlight, that out there, the beggar on the street, myself—all a part of the great Whole—the Truth Absolute.”

“Mathematics,” I said, “is the only truth—mathematics in the larger sense, which includes art, music, science–”

But the faith of her childhood was not to be limited to equations. At luncheon, one day, we discussed the beauty of certain phrases, especially those of the King James version of the Bible. She mentioned the comfort and sheer loveliness of the words: “And underneath are the everlasting arms.”

I agreed, but pessimistically added:

“The ghastly thing about it is, that they’re not there—that this tiny pellet of a world is a part of no protecting consciousness—is drifting unheeded through space.”

“But it holds to its orbit—keeps its place in the constellation. Something sustains it.”

“A law—gravity, perhaps. Nothing that cares.”

“Oh, but there is—the arms are there—I am certain of it.”

She was interested in dreams. “I have dreamed things that happened; sometimes soon after,” she once said, and added: “I have worked out scenes in my sleep, and half-sleep, when my subconsciousness had full control. And I have many times experienced something that I am sure I had experienced before—possibly in a dream.”

“Science has accounted for that, rather prosaically, I believe.”

“Science is always accounting for things, and then by and by, it accounts for them again, in another way.”

One day, when I was rather down, she said to me:

“I know all about how futile one’s work can seem—how inconsequential. So many times last Spring I thought: ‘What am I doing this for? Dressing up and pretending to be something I am not—selling myself to these people. ‘Vanya’ was a beautiful play, and I loved it … but to do it publicly. It was just offering oneself to be seen, for money. I never had quite that feeling, doing the pictures. The audience was not present; we were doing the picture primarily for ourselves—at least it seemed so—making a panoramic painting, on a screen.”

One day I made use of the word “dooryard.” Surprisingly, I found it new to her, but she liked the sound—the picture it conveyed. “When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed,” I quoted from Whitman. She thought it a beautiful phrase.

In the article she had written for Oliver Sayler’s book, I read—as already she had said to me:

I do not believe in the sound film. Something very right, very true, very precious, was cut short on the verge of its ultimate and certain perfection by the intrusion of spoken dialogue and by the consequent throw-back of the cinema toward the theatre. The silent film was slowly coming into its own as an independent art which had nothing to do with the theatre, an art closely allied with music, dependent on music, an art which visualized music, creating independently to a certain point and completed thereafter by music.

But then, one day, she said:

“The silent film came to an end none too soon; it had gone as far as it could go.”

I looked out of the window, puzzled. A vessel of considerable size was passing up, toward the Sound. Noticing it, she added:

“I love a ship; any ship; I would go anywhere a ship was going. I never see one that I don’t wish to be on it.”

“I don’t think I quite understand,” I said.

“About my loving a ship?”

“No, I understand that—entirely. It is what you say of the pictures … I can’t quite reconcile it with your article in Sayler’s book.”

“But that was theoretical. What I said just now related to existing facts. The silent pictures had gone as far as they could go in the hands they were in … too far. In the right hands, they might have saved the world. They spoke a universal language—the only one ever invented. They could have brought all the nations together … done away with the narrow patriotism that childishly celebrates its own country above all others, that has for its motto ‘My country, right or wrong,’ a sentiment unworthy of grown-up, enlightened people. Human beings are pretty much alike, the world over. Difference in language is the chief barrier between them. With the interchange of films, which all but the blind could read, I believe these barriers, in time would have disappeared. Now …”

“Now …?”

“The barriers are busily being built up again. George Arliss’s ‘Disraeli,’ a beautiful talking picture, would be practically wasted in any country but England and America. An operetta has a better chance. There is a German one on 55th Street that you should see—‘Two Hearts in Waltz Time’—clean and wholesome, with lovely music. You come away from it with a kindlier feeling for Germany. Even better were the lovely silent pictures, with such titles as were needed, in the language of each country. I know something of that, from the letters that came to me, from everywhere. Fine, friendly letters. The writers of those letters could not be our enemies.”

V

“UNCLE VANYA” TAKES THE ROAD

“Uncle Vanya” reopened September 22, at the Booth Theatre, with the original company, except for the part of Sonia, which was played by Zita Johann. That Miss Johann is a successful actress has been sufficiently demonstrated. Yet one could hardly fail to resent any change in the perfect “Vanya” cast. It did something to the illusion. The scenes between Helena and Sonia were still lovely, only Sonia wasn’t quite Sonia any more, but just someone playing her part, pretending. Lillian was all that she had been—my knowing her had not made her any less the illusion, Chekhov’s Helena. It was a warm night, but the audience was good—and appreciative.

When I saw her next day, she reproached me for not letting her know I was there. A week later, I went again, and this time sent in a card, specifying my seat. During the next intermission, a boy brought a little note.

“I am playing for you,” she wrote. “I hope you will think I am not doing it too badly.” And her kind heart prompted her to add: “God bless you!”

Then after two weeks, they were off for Boston, where they arrived at perhaps the worst moment in Boston theatrical history. A great military reunion was there—the streets were a bedlam—all day and far into the night. Not many could get to the theatre, the Wilbur, and those who could, were unable to hear the actors for the tumult outside. What an atmosphere for Chekhov. Lillian wrote me:

It was such a nervous night. The theatre seemed like a barn to speak in, and the noises from the sky and the streets made us all wonder if the audience would tell what we were trying to do.

There are 500,000 strangers in Boston, all of them shouting, blowing whistles, shooting, or making some sound to convince the world that they are “happy.”

It is almost impossible to walk on the streets and today no motors are allowed within the city limits. Concentration is difficult. Just now, they are shooting beneath my window. Yesterday “Sonia” came over to rehearse our scenes. We found it impossible. Americans are at their very worst in such a mood, it seems to me.

These are the notices that Georgina cut from the papers. If they are bad it is not surprising, as we were far from our best, last night.

She did not read notices of herself, during an engagement; they made her self-conscious, she said.

The Boston notices were by no means “bad.” They spoke of the hard conditions under which the play was produced, the paid-for empty seats, the perfect cast selected for Chekhov’s picture of human futility. “A delicately beautiful dramatic tapestry,” the Globe called it, “its colors subdued and blended, as only master craftsmen can blend.... The company is superb, and the acting well-nigh perfect.” And the Transcript, with a full-length three-column picture of her, paid a just tribute to the play and its production. Lillian’s part it spoke of as “elusive, wraith-like, symbol of the unattainable. At the end, like a spirit of a passing dream, she drifts away, to leave them to their old problems and their solitude.”

But for a week, the attendance was very bad. Then the visiting military was gone, and the house filled. It would have been filled for a month longer, if they could have stayed. But Chicago was waiting.

Lillian was always reading some book on the road. This time she was re-reading “Wuthering Heights.”

What a beautiful piece of work is Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights.” It sweeps across the page like the winds on the moor that she knew so well. From fury to tenderness, with such understanding; how many lives had she lived before, to know so much!

She firmly believed in mental and spiritual growth through reincarnation. She was convinced that she had lived before—that now and again, she caught glimpses of a former life. Personally, I was by no means sure that mere human beings had known a previous existence, but I was certain that Lillian had. Not a previous existence, but the same existence, of which the present gave hardly more than a glimpse.

Chicago welcomed her with open arms: she had always been a favorite there. She wrote:

“They keep me moving as fast as a machine-gun in this kind, friendly Chicago. But I shall be so happy when I am by the East River, once more, talking in the little den.”

As for the papers, they could not say enough good things of “Uncle Vanya,” of Lillian, of the entire company. The Post gave a column of appreciation. It had a large picture of Lillian, and in part, said of her:

If an embodiment were needed of our Siberian spirit from the steppes, stalking from East to West, we’d say cast Miss Gish for the part—only, make the spirit glide across the stage, as does Miss Gish at her first entrance.... “Uncle Vanya,” as presented, may not be Chekhov, but it is superbly Lillian Gish—and this reviewer, for one, prefers Lillian Gish to Chekhov.

The News spoke of her initial entrance, “Not only as a perfect entrance for an actress to make out of the half-dream world of filmdom into the world of flesh and blood, but the whole of Chekhov’s drama in a fifteen-second gesture.”

Twenty-two years before, Lillian had last “played Chicago,” in a theatre where one’s dressing-room was in a flooded basement, and one had to wear a long skirt and high heels to avoid the Gerry officers. Now, the Gerry officers did not mind any more—the Harris Theatre was beautiful and well-appointed—one’s dressing-room had the fittings required by a modern star. And there were flowers in it, and a little heap of notes and cards—invitations, and requests for interviews. There had been no interviews twenty-two years ago, and if the critics noticed her at all, it had been obscurely and briefly, a line in some half-hidden corner. Now, her picture looked out from every dramatic page, while at the Goodman Theatre, in the foyer, along with those of Mrs. Siddons and John Kemble, hung the “Romola” portrait, which Nikolai Fechin had painted, the only portrait of a living actress so honored. Lillian had known that following its exhibition in New York, the portrait had been bought for the Chicago Art Institute, but did not know before that it had been hung in the Goodman Theatre. Now, she was obliged to go and stand beside it and be photographed, with a bevy of girls, and the papers published that, too. And here, in one paragraph, we have a romance as complete as any to be found in the story books.

It was on November 3, that “Uncle Vanya” reached Pittsburgh, a damp and heavy season of gloom.

“Someone dropped my heart into the pit of a coal-mine,” wrote Lillian. “I want so to find it, so I can dust it off before I reach New York.”

To brighten her stay, and to get material for our work, she brought “Aunt Emily” down from Massillon, not very far distant.

Pittsburgh was hardly a “Vanya” city, but the newspapers were kind—to the play and to the company.

Perhaps it was not strange—but only seemed so—that “Uncle Vanya” had its best houses in Newark, which had been substituted for Philadelphia. I am told there are a good many Russians there—it may be that Chekhovians and other cultured ones abound. At all events they did love “Vanya,” there, and said so, and I shall always hold them in affection for the sake of Jed Harris and his perfect company, and especially for the sake of Chekhov, whom a good many people regard lightly, or do not regard at all. The in-growing life of a Russian farm-house, the tragedy of a cherry orchard, are meaningless to them, or only amusing. It was amusing to Chekhov, too, who laughed—a little—that he might not weep—too much.

Lillian was at home again during the Newark engagement, going across the river each evening and matinée afternoon, unpretentiously by bus, with tiresome changes. She might have gone as befitted a great star, but she preferred to go modestly, and, as she thought, more suitably.

And then, presently, “Vanya” was being given in New York again, this time briefly, at the Biltmore. I saw it twice, there, and the charm of it did not wane, but grew upon me exactly as the charm of the play itself, when read quietly on a winter afternoon. It is my conviction that such another company to play “Uncle Vanya” is not likely to be assembled.

The “Vanya” engagement ended at the Biltmore on the evening of November 29, 1930. Following the matinée, Lillian had the company to her apartment, for dinner. She was as pleased as a child with the prospect of having them, and the arrangements. A friend had sent in some very good Italian home-made claret, there was a big turkey, and the tables were arranged in a T, in the living-room at Beekman Terrace.

Owing to the evening performance, the guests could not remain more than an hour, but it was an hour to remember. Kate Mayhew beamed on her younger companions. And when, that night, at the theatre, Griffith came behind the scenes and greeted her with a rousing kiss, she declared, later, to Lillian, that it was the happiest day of her life. “Dinner with you, and kissed by Mr. Griffith! What more could anyone ask?”

Lillian had not seen Griffith for some time. It was a surprise, therefore, when he came behind, at the end of the performance. It was something more than eighteen years since the day she had come to find Gladys Smith at the Biograph studio, and had first seen him, a tall man walking up and down, humming “She’ll never bring them in.”

What a story of endeavor those eighteen years had told. I have given many pages to it, but among the “Vanya” notices I find this unidentified bit which reflects the spirit of it all:

Lillian Gish, who has ever held high the torch of beauty during her entire career as stage and screen star, and with undeviating purpose has been representative of the finest and best traditions of the theater, adds another triumph to her list of admirable achievements. As the ethereal and wistful Helena she is all the author could have hoped for. Something more intangible she gives to the rôle than her delicate loveliness, her undeniable charm and the richness of her experience as a sincere and gifted actress.

VI

RELIVING THE YEARS

It became our custom to work two afternoons a week—Tuesdays and Fridays, and on the hour I found her always ready. Whatever engagement she made, she would keep it; whatever promise, even a partial one. I think she was born with that conscience, and the years of rigid picture appointments had kept it in repair. Griffith had said to her: “You, as the star, must never fail to be there. The others will take their cue from you. You must be on time.” And she always had been on time, and ahead of time. Once, by a lapse of memory on my part, I missed an appointment when we were to see one of the old pictures together. If she had scalded me with censure, I should have felt better—if she had even shown a little irritation, instead of anxiously helping me to find excuses, I could better have borne it. Five minutes later, it had passed from her memory, but it refuses to pass from mine.

We saw a number of the old pictures, that winter, as has appeared in earlier chapters:

Lillian, in “Broken Blossoms,” the picture that had made her the “world’s darling” and is still today recognized as the highest point touched by the pictures, for beauty and artistic perfection. I insisted on seeing this picture twice, for it seemed to me her masterpiece. From the moment she enters the picture, her whole attitude, her face, her hands, her feet, her bowed shoulders and bent back—every part and feature of her, tell her crushed, stunted, trampled life.

Of course, her wistful beauty added to the pathos of it all, but Lillian without beauty—if one can conceive that possibility—would have achieved a triumph. When she crosses the street, stoops to pick up the tin foil which she gathers to sell, looks into the shop window, touches the flower she wants, one’s heart turns fairly sick for the broken child.

She had not wished to play the part, because it was of a child of twelve. “I wanted Griffith to get a girl of that age.”

“But a girl of twelve could never have done it.”

She did not answer, only mentioned that she had been ill at the time.

“Do you consider it your best picture?”

She hesitated.

“If not, what would be your choice?”

Again she hesitated, then:

“‘White Sister,’ perhaps.”

We saw that, too, and “Romola,” and poor little Mimi, and Hester Prynne, made when Lillian had become, beyond all question, “First Lady of the Screen.”

It was toward the end of March that we saw the last of her great silent pictures, “Wind.” The motion picture had arrived at mechanical perfection when it was made. It was one of the several “swan songs” of that ill-fated year. I thought it a remarkable picture—beautiful in its stark un-beauty. It only seemed unfortunate in that it presented the most sordid of human aspects against a background of wind-cursed wastes.

Lillian watched it almost without a word. I think she approved her part in it, and why not? Technically, she was at her best. We drove home rather silently.

“It was the exact opposite of ‘Broken Blossoms,’” I ventured to say.

“You mean …”

“That that was sheer beauty, while this–”

“But this had beauty, too, don’t you think?”

“Great beauty. The illusion of blowing sand … Letty’s cumulative terror of it—those were classic things. But I cannot imagine going through the torture of seeing it again. The ending didn’t save it.”

“No. I wanted it to end with her complete madness … with her rushing out into the wind … vanishing in the storm. They wouldn’t let me.”

“They thought they were giving it a happy ending.”

“I suppose so.”

We saw one more picture after that, “The Enemy,” her last silent film, and our winter was at an end—a winter during which, by a form of “eternal recurrence,” exactly symbolic of Ouspensky’s “duplicate reincarnations of the past” I had watched her relive the years, change from the young girl who had played Elsie Stoneman to the mature and finished actress of “Wind,” of “One Romantic Night,” of Chekhov’s Helena.