“Those aren’t for me, are they?” I asked, gesturing to the flowers.
He nodded. “I’ve been hoping to talk with you.”
Such lovely puppy dog eyes. How polite Harry was. Chivalrous, even. Sweet.
And yet how many men had seemed that way at first? In the past six months I’d made two dozen pictures with at least as many actors. I’d even been on the road for a short spell, appearing in a burlesque farce, The Seminary Girls. I was no longer the young innocent who could be had for a few cigarettes, a couple of whiskeys, and some comforting words.
“Well, thank you, Mr. Solter, but let’s get to the point quickly, shall we?” I didn’t yet accept his flowers.
He flushed. “Well, Miss Lawrence—well, you see, I’ve been working over at Biograph and—the director there would like to talk with you.”
I grabbed him by the wrist and quickly pulled him over to a corner. “What are you trying to do?” I whispered. “Get me fired?”
“You’ve not signed any contract with Vitagraph, have you?” He was still proffering those damned mums.
“No,” I said.
“Well, Mr. Griffith said he’d pay you twenty-five dollars, and you won’t have to do any sewing or mending—just acting. He wants you to be the leading lady of Biograph’s new stock company.”
I was stunned. Twenty-five dollars? Leading lady? “I don’t understand—”
“He’s seen you in several pictures. He’s been very impressed.”
“He wants … me?” I asked.
Harry nodded. I took the chrysanthemums then, without ever removing my eyes from Harry’s face. How kind, how gentle he was. He made a little shy smile and shifted his feet.
That’s how I try to remember Harry. That’s how I do remember him, most of the time. The other Harry—the one who came later—I try not to remember him at all.
I fell in love with him. Oh, that’s so clear to me now. How Harry came to fill that place inside me that felt so bereft.
“Mother,” I’d said just days before. “I do believe Linda is dead.”
She scoffed. “She’s just embarrassed because that great and important husband she was bragging about probably amounted to nothing. I’m sure Belasco turned him away at the door.”
“I haven’t heard from her in nine months,” I said, turning to Ducks.
He made a sympathetic face. He was getting old now, pure white hair and sunken eyes. “Don’t lose hope, Florrie,” he said, and his old hand reached out for mine.
I took it. “My last letter came back unforwarded. They must have left San Francisco. They were coming here. But if she were in New York, she would have contacted me.”
Mother sniffed. “She always put on too many airs for me.”
“They weren’t airs, Mother,” I snapped. “She just wanted to be a true actress. She was an artist.”
But it terrified me that I was already using the past tense in talking about her. I’d hoped that with my sudden, daunting fame as The Biograph Girl, I’d hear from her, that she’d see me up there on the screen and contact me.
But she never did.
It was easier to believe Linda was dead than merely gone.
“Here you go, Miss Lawrence.”
He had borrowed a car to take me over to Biograph, a shiny convertible. I could see how proud he was that he drove an automobile and not a wagon.
“Here,” he insisted. “Let me help you in.”
I grinned at him. “Might I drive, Mr. Solter? I’ve had experience.”
His face flushed. “Oh, that wouldn’t do, Miss Lawrence. A gentleman should never allow a lady to drive a car.”
“Oh,” I said, unable to hide my amusement. “I see.”
He opened the passenger-side door for me. I gathered my skirts and stepped up into the car. He smiled at me; I smiled back. “Are you in?” he asked.
How polite he was. Solicitous. No man had ever been quite so solicitous toward me before, with the exception of Ducks.
Harry closed the door gently. Then he stood straight, cleared his throat, and flattened his lapels. He proceeded to the front of the car to turn the crank. He glanced over at me, giving me a little nod before bending down to his task.
The crank made a terrible grinding sound. The car did not start.
He stood up, nodded at me again, his face red, and tried once more.
The same horrible sound.
“Mr. Solter?” I asked.
“Don’t worry yourself, my good lady. I’m sure it’s just a minor adjustment. I can lift the hood and—”
“But, Mr. Solter,” I suggested, careful not to sound too condescending, “I think the problem is simply that you’re turning the crank the wrong way.”
He just looked at me. Then he laughed. “Miss Lawrence, I assure you—”
I let myself out of the car and hurried around to the front. “See?” I said, turning the crank myself in the correct direction. The car began to rumble. “I’ve driven these plenty of times.”
He managed a tight smile. He thanked me, then insisted on helping me back into the car, opening the door for me and closing it once again after my skirts were safely inside. Then he walked around the front and settled himself behind the wheel.
“I’ll go slow,” he promised. “I’m sure you don’t want the wind to ruin your hair.”
“Heaven forbid,” I said.
Poor Harry. Poor, darling, sweet Harry. He drove slowly because that was the only way he could drive. He was terrified behind the wheel. I saw the big beads of sweat run down the side of his face and drop off onto his high starched collar. I later learned the car was Mr. Griffith’s, and he’d lent it to Harry to make an impression on me. And it did—or rather, Harry did. Oh, the wild driving I could have shown him in that car. But in some odd way, I felt content to settle back in the seat and let Harry worry about the wheel. I felt content and comfortable and secure.
Oh, Harry, when I think of how it all ended—who could have predicted it? No one, not then. Not in those first few days, when all his stumblings and bumblings made me smile and laugh and fall head over anklets in love with him. He was gentle, unassuming, yet so earnest it made me want to cry. The drops of sweat beading off his chin cinched it. No man had ever tried so hard to take care of me—no one since Ducks. It didn’t matter that I needed no taking care of—not then anyway. What mattered was that he wanted to.
Harry was more than ten years my senior, the son of Southern sharecroppers. He’d left home at the tender age of seven to follow the circus. He’d ridden elephants and tamed lions; he’d barked in front of the bearded lady’s tent. He’d acted in Shakespeare on the West Coast and performed blackface in New York. He’d ridden in gaily colored wagons with Gypsies. There wasn’t much Harry hadn’t done.
He was like a boy, really, but when he laughed, he would shake the room. A big man, tall and thick, but gentle, too. Like the docile bears he’d performed with in the circus, with hands to match. I remember his hands so well: twisted knuckles, crooked thumbs, the way his palms would sweat when they were holding mine. He was constantly breaking our grip to wipe his hands on his pants and apologize. I’d just laugh at him. When he took my little hand in his big bear paw, it would disappear completely.
Yes, I fell in love with Harry Solter. We might have made a family someday, a real family, he and I and our little—
But enough. It didn’t happen. Instead I became a movie star.
Harry stopped the car in front of the now famous old brownstone at Number 11 East Fourteenth Street. I remember looking up at the big oak door with the frosted glass, the number 11 painted on in gold leaf. Harry helped me out of the car and then hurried to open the door for me as a proper Southern gentleman should. Inside the brownstone, I liked what I saw. I stepped across the marble foyer to discover a company just taking form, a magic just beginning to coalesce.
You see, I had no idea, not then, of the importance of what Mr. Griffith was doing, no clue that his muttered conversations
with his cameramen and lighting assistants would intrude upon the established perception of art, forcing a place among the masters for the upstart discipline we called film.
Yet I suppose I should have suspected something more was afoot than moviemaking as usual. Mr. Ranous, the director at Vitagraph, had never aimed a spotlight at me in the dark and told his cameraman to keep cranking. Prevailing wisdom insisted that only full, bright, overhead light would do. Mr. Griffith’s pictures with their chiaroscuro lighting unnerved some in Biograph’s front offices, but the trade papers pronounced them magnificent.
And the close-up—Mr. Griffith didn’t invent it, but he used it more often and more cleverly than most, a development we actresses applauded wholeheartedly. He had a way with us. He was never crude, never uttered a profanity in front of his actresses. He complimented us, coddled us even. He was Southern, like Harry. They both treated me as if I were some fragile piece of ancient ceramic, as if I might break if they dropped me, as if the harsh sunlight up on the roof might wilt my “delicate womanhood,” as Mr. Griffith called it. Yes, they were always trying to protect me. I could never quite figure out from what.
Later, to both my amusement and chagrin, I learned that Mr. Griffith had, in reality, meant Florence Turner when he sent Harry on his errand to Vitagraph. It had been Flossie Turner who had so impressed him. But by then, it didn’t matter, for I’d proven my worth to him. By then I’d shown him it wasn’t just fancy lighting and camerawork that brought people into the theaters. Good old-fashioned star power—such as we had on the stage—could do it, too.
I think I took Mr. Griffith by complete surprise when I’d mount a horse easily, hiking my skirts and riding it like a man. On our outdoor shooting days, Mr. Griffith never seemed to know quite what to make of me. “You have a boy in your soul, Miss Lawrence,” he said. I took it as a compliment; I’m not sure he meant it as such.
But he brought something out in me I hadn’t known was there. Once, when I was playing a part that called for me to be terrified by an intruder, I was prepared to use all the stock-in-trade mannerisms Mother had taught me for expressing terror on the stage: wide eyes, hands in my hair. But Mr. Griffith had other ideas.
“We don’t have to play to the balconies, Miss Lawrence,” he told me. “The camera sees much more intimately.”
“Then how shall I do it?” I asked.
“Have you ever been really terrified, Miss Lawrence?” he asked. “I mean terrified beyond any words to describe your fear?”
Once. When I was a girl. Back in Buffalo, at the great world’s fair. But that’s a story for another time. I can’t bear it right now.
“Yes,” I told him plainly. “I have.”
“And what did you do? How did you react?”
“I laughed.”
Mr. Griffith smiled. “Do it,” he instructed.
I wish I could remember the name of that picture. There were so many. But it worked—as he knew it would. My terror bubbled over into madness. I remember how terrified I was, watching myself up on the screen later. I knew it was a photoplay. I knew it was me up there, acting out a part. But I sat in terror nonetheless.
We made close to seventy pictures together, David Wark Griffith and I. Mostly one reelers, with the occasional “select picture” running to two. Within a few short months, it was clear that we had the most popular pictures on the market, far surpassing anything else. And I—The Biograph Girl—was the most popular player.
In the world.
Now even Bernhardt herself was considering making pictures. Ellen Terry had done a series of films; Maurice Costello had signed up over at Vitagraph. Stage stars were slowly climbing down off their pedestals, and moving picture theaters were becoming huge, glamorous palaces. Much of the credit went to D.W. Griffith and the humble studio he lorded over at Number 11 East Fourteenth Street.
“And much of the credit for his success,” Harry often reminded me, “is due to you.”
The Girl and the Outlaw. The Stolen Jewels, with Harry as my leading man. The Barbarian Ingomar. The Romance of a Jewess. The Feud and the Turkey. Those Awful Hats. The Salvation Army Lass. The Drunkard’s Reformation. Even Shakespeare: The Taming of the Shrew. Harry played Petruchio to my Katherine. And of course, the Mr. and Mrs. Jones pictures.
Who recalls such pictures today? Such queer titles, no? But ninety-odd years ago, they were the biggest moneymakers of the era, the movies everyone was flocking to see—and The Biograph Girl was the star of them all.
“Mr. Griffith,” I announced one morning, having carefully considered the situation with Harry and Mother the night before. “I would like a raise to thirty-five dollars a week.”
He looked at me as if dumbstruck. He blinked a few times. I had been working for him just a few months.
But Harry had urged me. “You’re Mrs. Jones. He knows that. He knows how the public waits in line for blocks every time a new Jones picture is released. Go ahead and tell him what you want. You’ll get it.”
“Oh, Florence,” Mother had countered, elbowing her way past Harry, to whom she was growing increasingly resentful. “Don’t rock the boat. Mr. Griffith might get angry.”
But the sacks of letters spurred me on. “Harry’s right, Mother. I can get what I want. I’m The Biograph Girl.”
Such was precisely the reason Mr. Griffith and the other bosses feared our star power, why they kept our names carefully locked away in the studio files. When I presented him with my demand, all he could do was sigh and shrug. “All right, Miss Lawrence,” he said. “I’ll talk to the bookkeeper.”
And when I demanded my own dressing table, apart from the others, I got that, too.
A brisk autumn morning. I tied on my bonnet, gathered my skirts, and stepped outside into the glorious day, heading down to Fourteenth Street. My heart was singing. I walked with an utter belief in the future, a self-assuredness and tenacity I’ve never quite known before or since. My stride was quick and confident through the crowded streets to the Sixth Avenue “L.”
Along the way, I acknowledged the warm, surprised expressions I encountered. “Excuse me, madam,” one courteous lady said, stopping me in my stride. “But aren’t you The Biograph Girl?”
“Yes,” I said, shaking her hand, kissing her three little children all in a row. I signed a scrap of paper for them:
Warmest wishes from The Biograph Girl.
How simple it was in those first months. How sustaining was the unconsidered assumption that it would last.
But on the subway that day, something happened. I caught the eye of a man whose incessant stare frightened me. He never looked away, just stared at me with black eyes through thick, dirty glasses, stroking his unkempt black beard. Even when I stepped off the train, he glared at me through the window.
His face stayed with me all day. At lunch I thought I saw him behind the chestnut vendor’s cart. You’re being absurd, Flo, I told myself. But Dorothy West and the other girls had all seen men like him themselves.
I will take you in my arms and carry you away.
Later that night, walking home, I heard the steady clack-clack of footsteps behind me. I turned around three times, and no one was ever there. Just shadows, long and obscene against the brick pavement. You’re being foolish, I scolded myself.
Yet did Lillian Russell take the “L” to the theater? Did she walk home unescorted? Of course not—and I was at least as famous as she was, even if no one knew my real name.
Sometimes there would be three or four bright-eyed youths gathered around the doors of Number 11. I’d always try to be gracious, but occasionally one of them would become a bit too aggressive. Once a young woman grabbed my hand and twisted my arm trying to get my attention. I was more startled than hurt; she never even apologized.
Inside, however, all was safe. I ran into Harry’s arms. “Florrie, you’re trembling,” he said, wrapping me in his musky warmth.
I felt comforted the way Ducks had once comforted me, as we made our way through the ho
rdes of little children crushing around the theater door. They were all clamoring for me, for a ribbon from my hair, for a touch of my dress. Ducks would carry me, shield me from their little grasping hands. It was now happening all over again. The more my fame grew, the more I felt like Baby Flo again. I buried my face deep within Harry’s chest and waited for my heart to stop thudding in my ears. This was why I loved him. This is why I came to believe I could not live without him.
But I wouldn’t have changed things. Oh, no. I wouldn’t have put the brakes on fame, no sirree. I was far too caught up in the magic, the very real magic that was being conjured behind the doors of Number 11. Oh, the joy I felt in that place, the symbiosis of talent, the thrill of creation. The “nursery of genius” it’s been called, and that was what it was. Here was where the movies were born.
All of those who worked there—they’re all gone now. Mr. Griffith and Dorothy West. Billy Bitzer, the cameraman. My darling John Compson and dear little Adele de Garde. Nothing’s left, not even the structure itself. Number 11 is now just the stuff of dreams—appropriate, perhaps, for dreams were what we made.
I was happy, perhaps fully for the first time in my life.
Harry and I kept our budding romance as secret as we could, meeting in broom closets for a quick little kiss, passing daisy petals back and forth between us during scenes.
We’d sneak off at lunchtime and order wonderful steamed cheese sandwiches at a little diner near the studio. But were never able to finish because the butterflies had yet to give up our bellies. We’d just gaze into each other’s eyes across the table and suddenly burst into laughter—two children having the ride of their lives, with no reason to think it would ever end. Sometimes we’d take the subway uptown, pulling our broad-brimmed hats far down our faces so as not to be recognized. When someone would begin to look too long or to point, we’d burst into laughter and jump off at the next stop, thrilled to make the escape.
On Lexington Avenue, Harry bought me hats and scarves and magnificent satin ribbons for my hair. It was so delectable, so intoxicating to be treated so well—so much like a girl, for the first time in my life. At times, it seemed I was playing a joke on him, maybe even being a little bit unfair—as if one day I’d just have to tell him with the truth: I wasn’t a little filly who could be charmed by flowers and ribbons. I really didn’t need a man to open the door for me. But I was having such a marvelous time playing the part, watching him do all these lovely, silly things, that I couldn’t bear to burst the bubble, not yet.
The Biograph Girl Page 18