The Biograph Girl

by William J. Mann

  The porter was suddenly beside me, smiling widely, his shiny black face eager to assist. “It’s been a great honor, ma’am,” he said. I thanked him. He opened the door for me. I looked back at Harry. He gestured for me to go.

  I took a deep breath and stepped out of the train.

  Now’s the time to tell the world that you aren’t dead.

  That’s what the papers had reported. That I was dead. Strange, isn’t it? How it’s happened twice in my life? The first time was that cold February morning back in St. Louis. The second time was that cold December morning nearly thirty years later, when I glanced down at the newspaper in Doris’s diner to see that I’d died by drinking ant poison. So many years and a world away from each other. But both times I died, I made the front page.

  MOVING PICTURE ACTRESS MEETS TRAGIC END

  BENEATH THE WHEELS OF A SPEEDING MOTOR CAR

  “Brilliant, just brilliant,” cheered Mr. Laemmle, the headline blaring up at him from his desk.

  Mr. Cochrane, his able, conniving partner, had stuck his thumbs behind his lapels and crowed. “Just as I told you, Carl. Just as I told you.”

  I was no longer The Biograph Girl. I was now an Imp. Mr. Laemmle had hired me for his Independent Motion Picture company. Oh, I thought I was just the bee’s knees then—and I was. I really was. So what if Mr. Griffith had canned me? He’d live to regret it. I was the most popular star in the world. Who did he think he could replace me with? That silly Pickford girl?

  “Miss Lawrence, meet Miss Pickford,” Mr. Griffith had said.

  So she was the one they’d threaten me with. “It’s an honor, Miss Lawrence,” the little waif said, looking up at me with big saucer eyes.

  That’s right: looking up at me. Although I was small, Mary Pickford was even smaller. Smaller and younger and far daintier, with all those damn curls. The kind of girl-woman Mr. Griffith preferred. Oh, I’ve heard the stories of Little Mary being a tiger, and I don’t doubt them—but that day at Number 11, she was sweet and angelic, and I loathed her.

  “Oh, my!” she gasped later on the roof when I lit up a cigarette and knocked back a whiskey, nearly in one movement. Mr. Griffith was gone for the day; a few of us had hightailed it to the roof to unwind.

  “What’s the matter, Mary?” I asked. “Do you not smoke or drink?”

  She just shook her pretty little head at me, those damn curls bouncing.

  “I don’t trust a woman who doesn’t drink,” I said, blowing smoke nearly into her face.

  Oh, wasn’t I terrible? Poor little Mary. Of course, later on, she became quite fond of her whiskey. But back then she was just an anxious pretender to my throne, a fact that made me angry and defensive. And bitter, too, for how Mr. Griffith—and his wife—nurtured her.

  So could anyone blame Harry and me for inquiring at other studios? If they were grooming Little Mary to take over my spot, we needed to, as they say, cover our arses.

  “I can’t believe you’d do such a thing, Flo,” Linda had shrilled my last day at the Biograph studio. “Going over to inquire at Essanay. David had no choice but to let you go.”

  Harry stepped between us. “She’s worth far more than Biograph is paying her,” he charged. “You just back off now, Linda.”

  “After all David has done for you,” Linda seethed. “For both of you.”

  I chose not to meet her gaze. “Well, Linda,” I said, “I’m sure you’ll be very happy to get all the parts I would have played.” I was gathering my belongings from the wardrobe closet. “Or is Little Mary going to be the beneficiary? Don’t go thinking she can be The Biograph Girl now. Even I have a hard time being her sometime.”

  “Flo, what has changed you?” Linda pushed past Harry and stood close to me. I nearly choked on her heavy perfume. “You’re not the girl I once knew.”

  “Oh, no?” I turned and faced her. “And what of the girl I knew—the one who wrote me every week, promising me we’d be friends forever?”

  “We would have been, but for your duplicity.”

  Harry was between us again. “We had every right to inquire elsewhere. Flo’s the most popular star in the world.”

  Linda reached over and grasped my hand. I let her hold it. For a moment, I saw myself in the translucence of her blue eyes, and we were back on that hill in San Francisco, and the sun was shining.

  “It’s still the applause, isn’t it, Flo?” Linda asked, her voice softer now. “The letters. The crowds in the street.”

  I pulled my hand away and snapped my case shut. “I’m ready to go, Harry,” I announced and quickly moved away.

  “David’s transforming the medium,” Linda called after us as we moved away. “No other studio can match him! No one else has his vision! If you had only trusted that, how far you could have gone.”

  “She’ll go plenty far,” Harry shot back. “You just watch.”

  I didn’t turn back. We left the building. I walked down the brown-stone steps of Number 11 for the last time.

  When I returned, fifty years later, I fought traffic congestion and smog driving down Fifth Avenue. When I turned on to East Fourteenth, my mouth went dry. I could scarcely believe what I saw. Nothing was left. The studio. The building. The entire block.

  Nothing left, but my dreams.

  “All right, so here’s the plan,” Mr. Cochrane told Mr. Laemmle, my new boss, who’d been thrilled to grab The Biograph Girl. “We’ll come up with a story that she was killed. Then we’ll resurrect her!”

  “And reveal her name,” Laemmle added.

  “I like it,” Harry said, his eyes lighting up. “Do you like it, Flo?”

  “I imagine it’ll stir up some interest,” I admitted.

  We were sitting around Mr. Laemmle’s desk. He was a kind-faced old gentleman with a heavy East European accent and perpetually moving hands. They were clapping now in front of him as the idea took shape in his mind.

  “We’ll show that damned Biograph,” he gloated. “This’ll put the IMP on the map.”

  “Of course, since it will be Flo’s name that will now be your chief asset,” Harry said, assuming an air of authority that somehow worked, even with his droopy eyes and elephantine ears, “we’ll expect a considerable raise from what she was getting at Biograph.” Oh, dear Harry. Always fighting my battles.

  Mr. Cochrane lifted an eyebrow. “How considerable is considerable?”

  “Oh, can’t we settle the money later?” Mr. Laemmle asked, standing up, his hands molding an invisible structure in the air. Maybe a new studio. Maybe an entire city. “Believe me, Miss Lawrence, you’ll be well taken care of. We’ll build our studio with you. Together we’ll dismantle the trust of the existing studios and make our pictures known around the country—around the universe!”

  “So I’ll receive billing then?” I asked. “On all my pictures? Just like on the stage?”

  Mr. Laemmle nodded. “I imagine we might even start a trend.”

  “All right,” Mr. Cochrane said, leaning over to us. “Here’s the story. We’re going to say the streetcar accident happened in St. Louis. I’ll leak the story to the New York press that you got run down on a visit. They’d be able to check it out too quickly if I said it happened here. Then, Carl, you denounce the story, saying it must have been Biograph that planted it because you’d stolen their top star from them. You reveal her name and say she’ll make a public appearance in St. Louis to prove she’s not dead. I’ll drum up support for a reception. I’ve got connections there.”

  “Such shenanigans.” I laughed. “What is the world of entertainment coming to?”

  Mr. Laemmle was moving his hands in front of Mr. Cochrane’s face. “Do you really think we can get a crowd? Maybe a couple dozen people to turn out to greet her train?”

  “I’ll do what I can,” Mr. Cochrane promised.

  That would show Mr. and Mrs. Griffith, I thought. Harry reached over and took my hand. He winked at me.

  We were going to St. Louis to tell the world I wasn’t dead
.

  “Harry! Harry!” I screamed. “Please, Harry, help me!”

  The mob had closed in around me. A woman took hold of my shoulders. “Thank God you’re alive!” she cried, but other hands tore her away suddenly. She was pushed down under the wave, and I heard her terrible shouts as she was trampled underfoot.

  Mother screamed from somewhere behind me.

  “Harry!” I called. “Dear God, Harry!”

  The crowd surged in again. Faces, faces—all crazed, all with wild eyes seared onto my memory. “It’s her!” they cried. “It’s The Biograph Girl!”

  Camera flashes exploded in my face. The stink of magnesium.

  I caught sight of Mr. Cochrane trying to get to me, the utter terror on his face.

  It’s all worked even better than we planned.

  But dear God, what had we done? What kind of monster had we set free?

  The shrill sound of a policeman’s whistle pierced through the rabble. Then more of them, all around me. Tweet! Tweet! Tweeeeeeeet!

  Hands, hands, hands groping at me, tearing my clothes.

  “Harry! Haaaaarrrry!”

  The cameras flashed.

  I felt my legs give out.

  I lost consciousness.

  The sharp snap of smelling salts under my nose. Mother’s face hovering above me. Blue-suited policemen around me in a ring.

  “Save … me,” I cried weakly.

  Harry’s arms, lifting me. “Come on, Florrie,” he was saying. “There’s a car waiting.”

  The cheer of the crowd as I stood. Later, the local paper would write:

  When a way was cleared for her, a tiny woman with the face of a wildflower nervously passed through the narrow aisle.

  A few in the mob were chanting, “We want The Biograph Girl.” But even more were now calling, “Miss Lawrence! Miss Lawrence! We love you!”

  I have never forgotten it. I have dreamed of it for eighty years, waking each time with clammy skin on damp sheets.

  “It was horrible!” I screamed at Mr. Cochrane from my bed back at the hotel. “I won’t do it! Not ever again!”

  Mother pressed a warm wet facecloth on my brow. I sat up abruptly and shook her aside. “Do you hear me? Never!”

  Harry sat down on the edge of the bed beside me, taking my hand in his. “Oh, but you must go back out there, Florrie,” he insisted. “It’s the only way!”

  “Florence,” Mother said, “these are your fans! They love you! You owe it to them!”

  “I’ve never heard of such a thing.” I lay back down, shivering under the blanket. “If they love me, why did they try to hurt me?”

  Mr. Cochrane tried to steady my nerves. He gave me a glass of whiskey, which I accepted gladly. “They just got a little carried away—that’s all,” he said.

  “I’ve never heard of Sarah Bernhardt’s fans pushing her to the ground. What is it about the movies? Why do they cause people to react so?”

  “Not sure,” Mr. Cochrane said. “But I know more folks turned out to see you today than were on hand to meet President Taft’s train a week ago. Same station, same platform—half the people.”

  “More than the President!” Mother gushed.

  I closed my eyes. Once, a decade before, I’d seen William McKinley. I remembered the crowds pressing around him—how he was trotted out on the stage at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo like Jumbo the Elephant and forced to perform.

  That was how I felt. I couldn’t bear to go through it again. But I did. Of course I did. Harry, Mother, Mr. Cochrane—they wouldn’t have let me stop. Everywhere I went that week I drew enormous crowds. The police protected me better now, with five of them surrounding me at all times. But they couldn’t prevent the cameras from flashing, keep the hands from reaching out, trying to touch an article of my clothing. Someone snagged my scarf at one stop, pulling it into the crowd. The cameras burst, blinding me.

  Mr. Cochrane was speechless. None of his machinations had been needed to bring out the public. They came anyway, even without his bidding. I traveled with my new IMP costar, King Baggott, a tall, stolid man, dear and sweet but just a little bit dull, the way most handsome actors were in those days. For two days and two nights, we went around the city of St. Louis making appearances: “clever little speeches,” the newspapers said.

  We had names now. I was now Florence Lawrence, Motion Picture Star. Mother was treated like Queen Mother Alexandra at our hotel. For all her previous reticence about pictures, she was clearly adoring the attention. She took to calling me “Queenie,” in fact. She even condescended to be civil to Harry. After all, his nurturing of my career seemed to have been on the mark.

  But after every stop, after every crush of screaming crowds, I’d come back to the hotel and puke my lunch into the toilet. All the crab cakes and sweetmeats and champagne that were always being pushed on me. Mother was quite embarrassed by my purging. Harry kept wanting to send for the hotel doctor—but I said that it was just nerves.

  Just nerves. Of course it was nerves, but it was hardly “just.” Those nerves wrecked me. They plagued me every day from then on—until the day Lester pronounced me dead and I walked out of that hospital a free woman.

  That’s not to say I didn’t want it—the fame, the celebrity, the applause. Linda was right. It still was the applause. Standing there with King, waving to the crowds, hearing their cheers, I was Baby Flo again, back on the stage, the men in the tall silk hats applauding me. So full of myself was I that I told one reporter: “The American public, when it loves its heroes and heroines, can love them with a better spirit than any people I know.”

  And forget them, I might have added later, with precisely as much spirit.

  It had all been timed so perfectly. My new film—costarring King Baggott—came out just days after the St. Louis triumph. The Miser’s Wife, it was called. I can’t even remember now what it was about. But I was the star. Right up there with my name above the title. It had never been done onscreen before. Can you imagine such a time? It’s so standard now. But the concept of movie star didn’t exist until 1910, and then it was the product of one publicist’s imagination and one actress’s ambition.

  Within months, dozens of other names were revealed. Gene Gauntier at Kalem. Broncho Billy Anderson at Essanay. My old friend Flossie Turner and John Bunny at Vitagraph.

  But over at Number 11 East Fourteenth Street, Mr. Griffith stubbornly kept his players’ names locked in his safe. Pickford was still just “Little Mary” to her rapidly growing public. “The star isn’t what matters, David,” I could hear Linda telling him, her perky little nose in the air. “It’s merely a fad. What’s important is what you’re doing—it’s the art that you’re creating.”

  I had to smile when I imagined Linda’s reaction to the explosion that greeted my appearance in St. Louis. The fan magazines with my picture on the cover. The trading cards with my face on them. The deluge of reporters surrounding the little apartment Harry and I shared in New York. It got so bad that within a few months I bought us a secluded house on a farm out in quiet Westwood, New Jersey. Oh, how I loved that house. With the money I was suddenly making, I could afford to make it the home I’d always wanted but never had. An apartment for Mother. Another for Ducks and his latest beau, an Italian immigrant named Alfonso. A stable of horses. Acres of beautiful rosebushes.

  But I rarely had time enough to spend there. The rosebushes quickly grew wild. If not for Ducks, the horses would have gone untended. I was forever in New York at the studio, churning out two reels a week. The public demanded to see Florence Lawrence, in just about anything.

  There was no one bigger than I was. Except …

  “This one,” Mr. Laemmle said, slapping a page in Moving Picture Weekly. A photograph of a girl with curls. Pickford. “And I’ll be damned if I’ll let Biograph keep her.”

  “The public doesn’t even know her name,” I protested.

  Mr. Laemmle nodded. “This one doesn’t seem to need a name. You didn’t either, Fl
orence, and they still discovered you. The public’s calling her The New Biograph Girl. The fan magazines say she inherited your old dressing table.”

  How old was I then? Twenty? Twenty-one? Maybe a bit older. Who can remember now? But Mary Pickford was younger than I, by a number of years. I know that much. Such things mattered. And the fact that Mr. Griffith’s pictures—which now starred her—were still the most popular on the market was distinctly unnerving to me. And to Mr. Laemmle.

  I decided the only thing that could console me was horseback riding. It had been so long since I’d been on a horse. I’d been so busy. Out to Westwood I drove, snatching Harry’s automobile without his permission. He’d have to follow on the train. I got to the stables and found Ducks brushing the amber coat of my favorite horse.

  “Ah, Florrie,” he said.

  “I need to ride, Ducks. It’s all so crazy. I just need to feel the wind in my hair.”

  He nodded. “Ride like you did when we were out west. Remember how you’d ride ahead of the company, getting to the next town hours before we came lumbering in?”

  I did remember. “Ducks, it’s not what I thought,” I said as he helped me mount the horse.

  “No, it never is.” He looked up at me with his old eyes. When had he gotten so old? “You’ve been working too hard, Florrie.” He reached up and took my hand in his. “Promise me. You’ve got to stop. You can’t let it take over.”

  I felt like crying. “But you always said I’d be a great star,” I told him.

  “You can be anything you want to be, Florrie.”

  He truly believed that. Ducks, more than anyone, believed in me. More than I believed in myself at that point.

  “Ride with me, Ducks,” I said.

  He laughed. “Wish I could. But the lumbago, Florrie. Keeps me from doing a lot of things I used to do.”

  I understood. Sometimes I’d get a headache or a dizzy spell, and I couldn’t bear to get behind the wheel of my car. Driving could usually make me feel better, especially when I could escape from New York, but not on days when I couldn’t even drag myself behind the steering wheel.