The Biograph Girl

by William J. Mann

  They take a few steps toward the lake where the great swashbuckler slumbers peacefully in his crypt. A blue heron descends gracefully, its long legs unfolding and taking root in the still water.

  “There aren’t many places like this left out here anymore.” Roddy sighs, lifting his eyebrows, looking over at Richard. “Hollywood the civic has been dreadful in enshrining Hollywood the mythic. That’s why I put the marker on poor Flo’s grave. Now they’ve gone and dug it up. And to prove …?”

  His voice drops into a whisper. “That’s the danger, you see. Proving too much destroys our truth.” He smiles kindly over at Richard. “Just remember that as you go through all of this.”

  Suddenly a flock of birds takes off from the trees overhead, startling Richard, their wings flapping furiously through the air in the glorious sunlight. Richard’s eyes can’t help but be drawn to them, and he watches until they’re gone, vanished into the blue of the sky.

  When he turns back, he discovers Roddy is gone, too. Although Richard looks around several times and scans the horizon for as far as he can see, the actor is nowhere to be found—vanished, as if by the magic he preached, into the illusion of the day.

  May 1921

  The train hissed a sudden breath of steam and came to a jarring halt at the platform.

  “Hold on, hold on,” the porter grumbled, pushing past me.

  I thought of that porter in St. Louis, all those years ago, on a very different train ride. His eager, shiny face had lit up as he held the door for me. “It’s been a great honor, ma’am,” he’d said.

  This one merely unhitched the door and swung it open, never glancing up at me.

  I stepped out onto the top step leading down to the platform. It was my first time in Hollywood. I looked out across the crowd into the bluest skies I’d ever seen—even bluer than the treasured skies of old San Francisco. In the air I could smell the perfume-sweet fragrance of orchids and oranges. Hollywood. Even the name was pretty.

  On the platform below, wives and children and sweethearts were greeting passengers departing the train. I scanned their faces eagerly.

  “Come on along, ma’am,” the porter said sharply behind me. “Step lively down the stairs.”

  “I’m looking for my entourage,” I told him.

  He clearly didn’t know who I was. I’d been away from pictures five years—but five years in the early days was much longer than it is today. Mr. Kerns had promised to meet me at the station with a band. He’d even asked Mary Pickford, Lionel Barrymore, and Lillian Gish to accompany him—three of the stars of the old Biograph to welcome The Biograph Girl back to the screen. “It’ll be great press,” he told me. “The fan magazines will eat it up like peanut butter!”

  But I looked down into the jumble of people and saw no one I knew. Surely they were here somewhere. I narrowed my eyes into the throng, now rapidly diminishing.

  Yet if Mary Pickford was here—why, there would be a good deal of commotion. And where was the band? Why hadn’t Mr. Kerns given the command to strike up a tune? Hadn’t he seen me standing up here?

  “Please, lady,” the porter growled. “Go down the stairs.”

  I gave him a foul look and made my way down. At the bottom I looked around hopefully, but saw no one. I walked alongside the still smoking train, the taste of soot bitter on my tongue. I clutched my suitcase in my right hand. Around me lovers were reuniting; fathers were embracing their excited little children. I stopped at one scene: a little girl being hoisted in the air by a proud, ebullient papa. “Annie!” the father crowed, kissing her plump little cheeks. “My little Annie!”

  Annie.

  Annie Laurie.

  I forced myself to look away. Why did I do such things to myself?

  Because the girl—she’s the same age—

  As—

  Stop it, Florence. Why waste time gazing at them when Mr. Kerns was surely in this crowd looking for me? I was back—I had returned—I had become Florence Lawrence again and now I had to live with that.

  I pushed onward. A woman ahead of me glanced up and saw me approach. I’m sure she recognized me. I saw the familiar flicker in her eyes, the wonder on her face.

  But then she looked away.

  So I found a bench off by myself and waited, my suitcase at my feet. Very well then. Let Mr. Kerns find me.

  I waited on that platform for nearly thirty minutes until all of the people had departed and I was alone.

  Panic only gradually began to settle in. What do I do now? What did this mean?

  Oh, take hold of yourself, Flo. You know what to do. Pull yourself together. Don’t let it overtake you this time. You’ve spent five years recuperating. You’re stronger now. You take a cab to your hotel and call Mr. Kerns from there. There’s obviously been a miscommunication. Perhaps he expects you tomorrow.

  I laughed to myself. Perhaps we can restage it—get Pickford down here and I’ll pretend to step off the train, cameras flashing.

  “Florence?”

  I looked up. A woman.

  “Florence Lawrence?”

  “Adela,” I said, the gratitude and relief clear in my voice.

  “My dear, look at you,” she said, taking my hands. “Still as lovely as ever.”

  Adela Rogers St. Johns was the Mother Confessor of Hollywood. I’d known her before, when she was one of Hearst’s reporters. Now she was head writer for Photoplay. I’d sent her a letter before I departed, telling her of my return to the movies. I suggested she come down to Union Station to see the welcome Mr. Kerns had planned for me.

  “There must have been a mix-up,” I told her, trying to laugh. “Mr. Kerns will be so amused by it.”

  Her brow creased sympathetically. She was a tall, aristocratic lady—thin, arch, beautiful in her day. She wore upswept auburn hair and a choker of pearls around a long, long neck. Today she boasted bright red lipstick and one of those newly popular short skirts, riding up above her knees. Her legs were quite shapely, encased in the sheerest black silk.

  “Of course there was a mix-up, darling,” she said, looking down at my one suitcase. “Here, let me take that for you. I suppose you’ll be needing a ride to your hotel then?”

  “We’ll come back and stage it tomorrow, Adela,” I said. “You’ll come back, won’t you? Well, of course, you will. Pickford will be here.”

  “Mary’s in New York meeting the Prince of Wales,” Adela told me plainly, lifting my suitcase. “Come on, Flo. My car’s in the lot. You staying at the Hollywood Hotel?”

  I gave her a little smile. “No. The—the Rose.”

  She looked at me queerly. “The Rose? I’m afraid I don’t know—”

  I handed her a piece of paper with the address Mr. Kerns had sent to me. She glanced down at it and sighed. “All right, Flo,” she said quietly. “Let’s go.” She smiled over at me. “Welcome to Hollywood.”

  “Well,” I said, once we were safely in her car and I began to peel off my gloves, making light, “it certainly wasn’t the welcome I got at the pier when I returned home from Europe. Do you remember that, Adela?”

  “Oh, I do, Flo,” she said.

  “Or St. Louis,” I said, shivering. “That’s when we met, wasn’t it, Adela? In St. Louis?”

  “It was,” she said. “That was the trip that started everything.”

  I smiled. Yes, it did. Start everything. All of this. Hollywood was once a sleepy little farming community, with orange groves stretching as far as the eye could see, tumbleweeds somersaulting down dusty dirt roads. But now—I looked out around me from Adela’s Cadillac Torpedo convertible. The chauffeur was up front, and we sat on plush leather seats, the wind catching my hair despite my wide-brimmed hat. We drove down the most enchanting streets. Adela had decided to give me a little tour. Los Angeles was a revelation. Instead of the narrow lanes crowded by brownstone tenements that I knew from New York, I looked out onto wide avenues edged with tall, swaying palm trees and pastel-colored Spanish haciendas.

  On Hollywood
Boulevard, I thought I spotted Gloria Swanson whiz by in her famous leopard-print car. I didn’t dare betray my excitement to Adela. For hadn’t I been a star longer than Swanson?

  But that was a ruse difficult to perpetrate when we pulled up in front of the Rose. It was a small, shabby inn on a side street close to downtown Los Angeles. A great brown water stain marred the white stucco of the front. A potted palm on the sidewalk drooped lifelessly. We said nothing, just stepped out of the car.

  “I’m awfully tired, Adela,” I told her. “There’s no need to see me up. I’ll be fine. Thanks ever so much for the ride.”

  “Are you sure, Florence? Do you need anything?”

  “No, no bother, dear. But do come by tomorrow, will you? Perhaps we can all go down to the station—if Pickford’s not here, why then I’ll just insist that Barrymore and Gish turn out. Oh, won’t it be such a hoot?”

  She just looked at me. Then she embraced me roundly and said nothing else before turning and heading off in her car.

  I had to come west to Hollywood. The movies had moved there while I was away. There was nothing left in New York anymore. “If you want to get back on top, Florence,” Mr. Kerns had insisted, “you have to come out to Hollywood.”

  Mother, of course, had been adamantly against the move. “Vaudeville is what’s exciting now, Florence,” she begged. “Vaudeville! We can return to the stage—together —a mother-and-daughter act! What do you say?”

  “Don’t be absurd,” I snapped at her. “I’m going to Hollywood. Mr. Kerns has promised me a picture.”

  “At a studio tied together by a shoestring!” Mother’s hard, careworn face tightened into a network of a hundred creases. “Florence, you have no idea what you’re blundering into.”

  I spun on her. “You talk to me as if I were still ten years old and didn’t know anything about the business I happen to be in.” I stared at her until she blinked, backing down, a defeated old woman. “I am tired of having everyone butt into my affairs.”

  But the truth was, there was no one left to do any butting except Mother. Not since Harry—and thinking of Harry always made me sad.

  So I left the next morning on a westbound train. It took three days. Somewhere near Iowa I caught cold, and the alkali dust irritated my lungs. I lay in my berth, rarely venturing out to the rest of the train. All my meals were brought in. I convinced myself it might cause a ruckus if word got out that Florence Lawrence was on the train, that she had emerged from retirement. I was doing the porters a favor by lying low, I told myself.

  I had forgotten much of what she was like, Florence Lawrence. For five years, I’d gone back to being just Flo Bridgewood, tending my roses at my house in New Jersey, taking long walks in fields of goldenrod and Queen Anne’s lace. I’d even started riding again, taking my horse across the acres of clover and crabgrass, feeling the old intoxicating rush of wind in my nostrils. But Florence Lawrence had been needed: Bills weren’t getting paid. All that money we had made—gone. Someone once told me that movie money isn’t hard cash. It’s just so much congealed snow; it melts in your hand. Then, of course, the Great War came, and everything became more expensive.

  Still, there was more to it than that. If truth be told, I was missing her a bit, Florence Lawrence. Missing the glare of the arc lamps, the clamor of the crowds.

  Queer, isn’t it? That I should so despise it when I’m there and miss it when I’m gone? But much was happening in pictures. It was all so much bigger now, more exciting, more glamorous. Hollywood was being colonized. And there were so many new stars. When I came back from Europe, I’d still been in the Top Ten, but dead last. Among actresses, nine new faces—nine new names—preceded mine, women no one had heard of just a year or two before. Mabel Normand. Margarita Fischer. Kathlyn Williams. Vivian Rich. Mary Fuller. Florence La Badie. Marguerite Snow. Beverly Bayne. And, of course, always on top, Mary Pickford.

  Now only a select few of them remained. Pickford still, of course, and Normand. But the others? Who remembered Margarita Fischer in 1921—let alone today? Mother had tried to dissuade me from giving movies another shot, but I was determined to prove her wrong. Sure, there were dozens of new faces crowding the fan magazines now, but if Pickford could still be on top, then there was no reason I couldn’t come back.

  The picture Mr. Kerns had found for me was called The Unfoldment. I played a reporter, of all things, who wins the heart of a gruff city editor. Mother was right on one count: It was indeed made at a studio held together by a shoestring. My director was barely known, and Mr. Kerns wasn’t exactly a mover or shaker in the new industry. But it was the only thing offered to me in those five years, and I was determined it would be a success. Sure, Barbara Bedford may have played the ingenue, winning the handsome young man in the final reel—but I was the star. That was important. It was my name up there above the title, where it belonged.

  That first night in Hollywood, I sat in my hotel room and watched the sun set. It looked as if the sharp blue sky had been cut, rent by a gigantic blade, the firmament bleeding in vibrant pink and red. I bought a crate of oranges from a vendor out on the street, and they served as my first meal. Their fragrance filled my room and made me think of happier days.

  Mr. Kerns was not in his office when I called. I left a message for him to ring me at the hotel, but I didn’t hear from him that night. Instead I watched the sunset and held a little piece of pink satin ribbon in my hand. I’d taken it from atop an evergreen at my farm in New Jersey, where I was certain Harry had tied it. I ran it between my fingers over and over. Without it, I don’t think I would ever have been able to get through my first night in Hollywood.

  In the morning, I determined I needed a car. I couldn’t just sit and wait in my room, hoping for Mr. Kerns to arrive. In New York, I could travel easily around the city on the subway; Los Angeles offered no such convenience. And I certainly couldn’t take cabs all the time—I’d quickly deplete my small savings, all of which I’d withdrawn from the bank the day before my departure.

  I walked the thirteen blocks to the motor car dealership out on La Brea Avenue. I’d seen an advertisement and decided on the spot what car I wanted to flash around the palmy streets of Hollywood. A “Big Six” Studebaker—fast as anything yet made, with six cylinders. It was a dash of Flo Bridgewood coming through—the love of driving fast, of speeding up to the top of a hill and then flying down the other side.

  “A big car for such a little lady,” the salesman said.

  He was handsome. Younger than I was. No recognition in his eyes.

  We struck a deal. “Say,” he said to me. “You’re going to pay in cash?”

  “Yes,” I told him, handing over my four hundred dollars. “Isn’t that the fashion anymore?”

  He grinned. Yes, he was very handsome, I thought. Slicked-back dark hair, a pencil-thin mustache. Looked a little like John Gilbert. He put his thumbs behind his lapels, where he sported a bright orange carnation.

  “Actually, ma’am,” he said, “I’m finding most folks out here pay that way, if they’re in the films.”

  I blinked my eyelashes several times at him. “I’m an actress,” I said.

  “You are? What’s your name again?”

  I repeated it.

  “Ah, of course,” he said, lying through his gorgeous straight white teeth. “Of course, of course. Well. Aren’t I honored to have you buying a car from me?”

  The fool. Was he so busy polishing cars that he hadn’t been to the movies? He was young, but not that young. And it had only been five years, after all. Just five years.

  “I was in the war,” he told me, as if reading my mind. So that was it. I excused him his ignorance. “I was awarded the Croix de Guerre.”

  “A hero,” I purred.

  He flashed those white teeth. “If you say so, ma’am.”

  I puffed myself up, held my bosom high. “My new picture is called The Unfoldment,” I told him, enjoying the flirtation. “It’ll be finished in a few weeks. We hope to h
ave it out by summer.”

  “Well,” he said, counting my cash, all twenties, “I’ll look for it.”

  “You do that,” I told him.

  Something about this handsome young car salesman compelled me. Fascinated me, fixated me. I felt the need to convince him, to prove to him that I was, indeed, a famous star—that I was the first. That if not for me, none of this would be here. Not even his damn car dealership—what need did orange pickers have of Studebakers?

  “Here,” I said, withdrawing a card from my purse. “It’s my producer’s card. Won’t you call? Come by the studio—see us put the picture together. You can be my guest.”

  His lovely dark eyes twinkled. Maybe they conjured up thoughts of my dark-eyed island boy. I don’t remember.

  He took the card, glanced down at it, then up at me again. “I will,” he said. He gave me a dazzling smile. “I will do that, Miss Lawrence.”

  “Good,” I said, folding the title to the car and pressing it into my purse. “And your name again?”

  “Charles,” he said, extending his hand. I shook it. “Charles Woodring.”

  “Very well then, Mr. Woodring,” I said. “Pleasant doing business with you.”

  He escorted me to my car, opening the door for me as I slipped in along the seat. It didn’t have the tiger print of my old car, but what mattered was that it was mine. I now had wheels under my feet. Florence Lawrence wasn’t going to stay shut up in a shabby little sidestreet hotel.

  “I’ll take you up on your offer to visit,” Charles Woodring called after me.

  I tooted the horn at him. In moments I was out on the road, and I felt better than I had in weeks.

  Adela Rogers St. Johns lifted my chin with cold, efficient fingers.

  “Where’s the scar, Florence? You said the fire left scarring. I don’t see a scar.”

  She pulled the shade off the table lamp at our side and brought the glowing bulb close to my throat. She narrowed her eyes, leaning in to see.

  “It’s there,” I told her. “It took weeks to heal.”