The Biograph Girl

by William J. Mann

  After several seconds, she drew back, replacing the shade. I swallowed, folding my hands in my lap.

  “It’s not so bad,” Adela said, sitting back down across from me in a rocking chair. She opened her notebook and wrote something. “No deeper than the one Nazimova carries on her cheek.”

  “Will you say that?”

  She looked up from her notebook and smiled. “Of course, my dear,” she promised. “Makeup can hide anything these days.”

  I smiled at her in gratitude.

  “And how old are you now, Florence?” She looked down at the papers she’d brought with her. “Let’s see. I have in my notes you were born—”

  “I’m twenty-nine,” I told her.

  She looked up at me. A smile slowly crept across her face as she marked down the age in her notebook. “All right,” she said. “‘She is just twenty-nine,’” she read as she wrote. “‘Not really an old lady. In fact, even a bit younger than some of our highest-paid luminaries.’” She laughed and told me, “It’s true, you know. Clara Kimball Young just turned thirty-two, and Nazimova’s forty if she’s a day.”

  “Thank you, Adela.”

  She sighed. She set down her notebook on the table beside her and looked over at me kindly. “Oh, Florence. Are you sufficiently prepared for all this?”

  “I think so.”

  She shook her head. “Oh, I don’t know if you are. I mean, look at this place.”

  The room cried of poverty. Paint peeled away from the walls; the floor was covered in a layer of grime. The windows looked out over gray city roofs. I’d tried to spruce it up, arranging some cala lilies in a pitcher of water on the table. I opened a large box of chocolates. I was glad for the sweet fragrance from the box of oranges on the floor; it rid the room of its mustiness.

  But I couldn’t disguise how meager were my circumstances.

  “Look, Florence. Level with me,” Adela said. “When you’re washed up in pictures, it’s like starving to death outside a banquet hall with the smell of the filet mignon driving you slowly mad.”

  I just dropped my eyes to the floor.

  “It’s been, what?” Adela asked. “Five years, Florence? Five years you’ve been off the screen?”

  I looked up at her.

  Her eyes were big. They didn’t seem to blink. They just grew larger and larger as they stared at me. I felt as if I’d drown if I looked into them too long.

  “We need to explain that to the readers,” she said. “Five years is such a long time. Especially in pictures. It’s a lifetime.” She looked at me directly. “What were you doing all that time, Florence?”

  I slid the soft satin of the pink ribbon between my fingers.

  “I was … recuperating from the fire,” I said in a small voice, looking away.

  “Ah!” Adela said, as if something just struck her. She reached over, grabbed back her notepad, and scribbled something down. “It’s a good angle. Trust me. I haven’t been a scribe for ten years for nothing. Let’s see—how long were you paralyzed?”

  “It wasn’t paralysis, Adela. My nerves—”

  “But you have the scar!” She looked up at me quickly, then back down at her pad. She continued scribbling. “That would prove it!”

  I instinctively reached up and touched my neck. The fire had occurred on the set of Pawns of Destiny, one of my last pictures, made for my own production company at Universal and directed by Harry. Matt Moore had been my costar. He was supposed to be rescuing me from a burning building, and the fire had gotten a little out of control. A piece of the floor fell in, and I tripped. Cut my throat.

  “But it was my nerves, Adela.”

  She looked at my fiercely. “Your nerves and … what else?”

  There was no way I could tell her. It was all still so raw. All I could do was tell her the least of it. “The fire left me unnerved.”

  She sighed. “Oh, we all have nerves. But they don’t last five years, Florence. No one would buy that.”

  “There was just—” I paused. “There were a number of things, Adela. I just needed some time away.”

  “The last interview you gave me was right before you left.” Adela held up an old copy of Photoplay. Pickford was on the cover, of course. “In it, and I paraphrase, you said you were taking some time off to motorcar around the country with your mother. Well, did you get lost somewhere, Florence? It was an awfully long drive!”

  “I just needed some time away,” I said again.

  Adela sighed. “I’m trying to help you, Flo. Do you realize that?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Mr. Kerns was very happy I was talking with you, very pleased you’d write up the film big in Photoplay. He’s having trouble finding a distributor.”

  Adela sniffed. “All the more reason to come up with a good angle. And if you’re not going to tell me what happened in those five years, I’ll need to invent something. Tell me about the fire. Pawns of Destiny, right?”

  “Yes. There was a fire—”

  “Yes, yes,” she said, writing furiously. “And your former husband was the director—”

  “I never divorced Harry.”

  She looked up at me in surprise. “I thought you did.”

  “We just separated,” I told her. I suddenly felt so alone, sitting there without Harry at my side, negotiating for me, wheeling and dealing. “We never divorced.”

  “Were you with him when he died?”

  I felt the tears, but held them back. “No,” I admitted. “I wasn’t there.”

  “But you didn’t divorce.” She wrote something else. “All right. Good then. No one needs to know about the separation. We can say you were in mourning.”

  That much wouldn’t be a lie. I did mourn for Harry. I mourned for everything we’d had—or rather, everything we might have had. For five years, I wrestled with all the what ifs and if onlys. The time passed without my even knowing it was passing. Long days and nights in my bed, just crying, Mother despairing of me. Day after day, I’d lay there, my rosebushes growing tangled and sparse. It was only with enormous effort that I pulled myself to my feet, wandering outside into the sundrenched fields one spring. It was then that I’d found the pink ribbon tied to the crown of a blue spruce. Harry had tied it there the night he’d learned about Annie Laurie. It had to have been him. Who else was that tall?

  “Now, the fire,” Adela’s saying. “You said you fell through a floor.”

  “No, no. Nothing so dramatic. The fire was supposed to be under control. Harry had me walking too close to the flames, but I tripped, trying to help Matt Moore. That’s how I cut myself. Here.” I touched my chin again. “Harry kept filming. I was calling for him to stop, but Matt Moore came rushing up as the hero and picked me up in his arms. It made for quite the realistic scene. The critics said so.”

  “I imagine there must have been a lot of smoke,” Adela said, not looking up as she continued to write in her notebook. “So you saved Matt Moore. You risked your life to save him and were burned yourself. You carried him to safety the way he was supposed to carry you.”

  “But I didn’t carry him, Adela. He’s a huge man, two hundred pounds, and me so little.”

  “It was either that or let him die.”

  The simplicity of her words struck me. I repeated them. “Either that or let him die,” I said, as if trying the words out, as if seeing how they felt on my tongue.

  “So you took the time to recuperate from your injuries and the death of your husband, and now you’ve come back to start again,” Adela was summarizing.

  I blinked, looking into her eyes. “Yes,” I said quietly. “Yes, that’s the case.”

  She shrugged. “I’ll give it my best shot, Florence. But things have changed. You’ve never made a feature-length picture, have you? Just those old one reelers, right?”

  “I did one feature,” I protested, but she didn’t hear me. She just kept writing in her pad. It didn’t matter, really. The picture had been made in New York, and nothing made in New York mat
tered anymore.

  “They say I grew up with the industry,” I mused out loud as Adela wrote. “Well, it’s true. I did. And coming back now—well, it’s like coming back to your old home and finding it changed, all your friends and neighbors moved away. I know the studios today are nothing like they were in the beginning. But I’m confident acting is like riding a horse. Once you learn, you never forget.”

  Adela had looked up at me with tears in her eyes. Dear, kind Adela. I think she really wanted to help me. I think she really tried to do her best, tried to do the impossible and turn back time. “It’s coming together in my head,” she told me. “I know just the angle to take.” She wrote something else down in her pad. “Poor Florence Lawrence,” she said as she wrote. “Such a trial your life has been.” She looked up again and smiled. “I think it’ll work splendidly.”

  THE RETURN OF FLORENCE LAWRENCE

  THE AMAZING STORY OF A GREAT “COMEBACK”

  BY ADELA ROGERS ST. JOHNS

  Florence Lawrence is coming back to the screen.

  Florence Lawrence, the first screen star, the first movie queen.

  “The Biograph Girl.”

  Do you remember her? After five years, she is going to walk again the path she pioneered.

  And now that I have talked to her, I cannot help wondering whether her return is to be a triumph or a tragedy.

  I cannot tell you why she struck me instantly as being such a sad little figure. But when I first saw her, I felt my heart stop and sink a little—as it did when I first saw the vacant places in the ranks of the returned marching regiments of Yankees from the Great War.

  She has in her blue eyes the same look I saw in Sarah Bernhardt’s the last time she came to America—that look of brave, spiritual struggle against overwhelming odds, the look of a woman who knows what it is to fight a losing fight.

  Yet she is quite gay, fluffy, blond, and given to sweet and rather easy laughter. In no wise a gloomy person. She talks cheerfully, entertainingly, and you must read between the lines to patch together the story of her sorrows. But over and over again, I felt a lump in my throat.

  I found her in her room at a small hotel on a side street in Los Angeles. There were flowers in a white pitcher, a huge box of chocolates, and a sweet, pungent smell of oranges from a big basket on the floor beside a small couch-bed. On a chair was a cardboard box that frothed with pink silk and lace and ribbons. So it managed to be quite cheerful and feminine in spite of the drab wallpaper and ugly furniture.

  But it was the last place where you would expect to find a motion picture star.

  I know—as part of the short but crowded history of motion pictures—the story of Florence Lawrence. I know that she was the first motion picture star, the idol of the thousands who first answered the lure of the screen. I know that only the brief span of ten or twelve years ago she was “The Biograph Girl,” photographed, sought after, marveled over, adored.

  But I had not counted upon the long, harrowing months of illness—brought about by a fall through a burning building while she was making her last picture, when she saved her costar from certain death while risking her own—nor upon the sad death of her husband, nor the deep wound that was to cut her on finding how short, how very short, is the memory of not only the public but of fair-weather friends.

  “Sometimes,” she said, smiling, “I think it is harder to ‘come back’ than it is to ‘arrive.’”

  She did not tell me why she had chosen to come back now. But as she talked of her mother, her husband’s death, the years of terrific expense of doctors, nurses, travel, I suspected that the little fortune she had accumulated when she took America by storm had dwindled until it no longer seemed an adequate barrier for two women alone in the world.

  Then, too, I believe she has a deep, sincere love of her work, that drew her back when she found herself physically able to go on with it.

  “No one is ever happy unless they have their work to do,” she said with quiet conviction. “I do not think I have forgotten much. They used to say I ‘grew up with the industry.’ But it seems to have outgrown me now.”

  She has returned to a land where once she ruled supreme, where her name was a magic word, to find herself an outsider, her place usurped, her very name forgotten by gatemen at the studios. A famous producer who was once an extra in her company was “out” when she called. Girls who today have their names in electric lights, but who used to borrow her makeup and her gowns, have overlooked her return.

  She is not bitter. But she is hurt.

  For—it makes me smile to think it—she is only 29. Not really an old lady, you see. In fact, even now a bit younger than some of our highest paid luminaries. She is frail, easily tired, but she is still lovely. She has a scar under her chin from her fall, which adds to the strange pathos around her, but it is no deeper than the one Nazimova carries on her cheek, which the makeup hides so perfectly even from the all-seeing eye of the camera.

  “It’s a big citadel I’m attacking,” she said. “And today there are thousands besieging it. Every technical handicap has been overcome since the old days when I helped Mr. Griffith make those old two reelers. But I would not take anything for my experience in working against every handicap.

  “Somehow I feel sure that I am going to succeed. I—I must!”

  Her first picture is called The Unfoldment by George Kerns, head of the Producers Pictures Corporation. Never heard of them? She says to watch and see.

  I heard an old stage carpenter say the other day, “Florence Lawrence was the best of ’em all. I ain’t seen anybody yet can touch what she used to be, and I seen most of ’em work. She could make folks love her, she could.”

  They used to call her “the girl with a thousand faces.” If she had a thousand faces then at 16—17—20—, she ought to have 10,000 now. If she does “come back,” if she can win back her place in the hearts of the people—what a triumph it will be!

  So how about it? Will you rally around her? Will you rescue our little Biograph Girl from oblivion?

  Her sweet, sad little face is counting on you.

  “Sweet, sad little face?”

  Charles threw the magazine down on the table in overplayed disgust. “Sweet and little, I’ll give you,” he said. “But sad?” He took my cheeks between his cold hands. “I hardly think so.”

  He kissed me. A little too hard. Our teeth clinked like champagne glasses.

  We certainly had enough of those around. Prohibition might have been the order of the day, with all the legal taverns closed down, but Charles was pals with the top bootleggers in L.A. He kept a well-equipped bar at his house. He also had a maid and a butler and a fabulous sunken bathtub. His house shone of marble floors; his walls were draped in velvet. Charles hadn’t had money for most of his life, but now that he did, he was making a show of it. Auto sales were hot. After all, it was Hollywood on the cusp of the Roaring Twenties.

  He’d taken me up on my offer to visit the set. I was gracious and polite, escorting him around, securing permission for him to sit in the wings and watch me emote. The next day he arrived again, this time with a bouquet of red roses. We used them in a scene. He came every day after that, and I found myself looking forward to his visits. Every day he brought me flowers, and sometimes he’d bring a box of pastries for the entire crew. He became friendly with Mr. Kerns, promising to get him a car. When he flirted too long with perky young Barbara Bedford, I found myself absurdly jealous.

  Now he was escorting me to the premiere. He was drinking his whiskey straight. “So who will be there tonight? You got Mack Sennett?”

  “We sent him an invitation,” I said.

  “You worked with him, right? He’s an old friend, you said.”

  “Sennett was just an extra at Biograph,” I told him. “He was nobody then.”

  But now he was. And he hadn’t returned any of my calls.

  I’d tried calling my old costar King Baggott, too, who was now a big-time director. He’d been p
olite, but couldn’t promise he’d make it to the premiere. Late-night shooting, he said. He was sure I’d understand.

  “What about Pickford? She coming?”

  “Really, Charles,” I said, smiling. “I would think you’d only be interested in one star.” I batted my eyelashes. “Me.”

  He kissed me again. His tongue tasted of whiskey. He was really far too young for me. I should’ve known that. Mother would have prevented it had she been there.

  But she wasn’t. There was only Charles. He was handsome, to be sure—none of the cragginess that had so characterized Harry, no droopy ears or puppy-love eyes. He was tall and dark, with that flashy smile, that cleft in his chin. His hands, in contrast to Harry’s, were petite and cultured, and his nails were always clean. Charles never sweat. Never that I saw.

  Oh, he was smooth. He provided an enormous leopard-lined limousine for the premiere. We rode over as giddy as jaybirds, passing a bottle of champagne back and forth between ourselves. I was dressed to the nines, in clothes paid for by Charles.

  “I’ve got to try to appear casual,” I told him. “I want people to think I’m used to mink.”

  He laughed, leaning across the limo seat to kiss me again. “The triumphant return of Florence Lawrence!” he crowed.

  I smiled, pushing him gently away. “Careful you don’t spill the bottle.”

  But when we arrived at the theater, the sidewalks were barren. Just a couple of ushers and a few reporters, and the long blue shadows cast by the street lamps. Mr. Kerns had promised us a crowd.

  “I can’t get out,” I whispered to Charles. “There are photographers out there. And no people!”

  “They must all be inside already,” Charles said, peering over my shoulder onto the empty sidewalk.

  “Drive around the block,” I commanded the driver. “We can go in through the back.”

  “Like hell we will!” Charles shouted. “I didn’t rent this monkey suit I’m wearin’ and spring for this here limousine to go in through the back. No, sirree, Florence. I’m gettin’ my picture in Photoplay.”

  “But, Charles, there are no people out there. The reporters—they’ll write about it—make me sound so—so pathetic!”