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VIII
“WIND”

There had appeared an anonymous novel (later acknowledged by Dorothy Scarborough), a tale of sickening horror, entitled “Wind.” It was the story of a young, refined Southern girl, who goes to Texas in an earlier day; is made desperate by the wind and blowing sand and hard human circumstance; marries a rough cowboy; is violated by a man she had met on the train; murders him and goes mad—a category of black disaster.

It was regarded as fine material for a picture, well-suited to motion photography, because of the wild, tireless wind—perfect symbol of motion, and of the fierce action of the story. A director, Clarence Brown, was highly enthusiastic over the possibilities of “Wind” on the screen, but a favorable decision might have been less quickly reached had all the conditions been foreseen. For making the picture was an experience nearly as desolating as the story. When the studio scenes were finished, a trek of wagons, trucks and motor busses, loaded with paraphernalia, an entire company of actors, a big crew of technical assistants, mechanics, etc., the whole accompanied by eighty mounted cowboys, invaded the blistering Mojave Desert, in the cause of art.

Mr. Brown, after all, was not to direct. He had been sent off to Alaska, on the “Trail of ’98,” and could not, it seemed, finish it. Victor Seastrom was given the direction of “Wind,” and again Lars Hansen was Lillian’s leading man. Satisfactory as far as it went. They had waited a long time on Brown—until they could wait no longer. Spring had come. The Mojave in midsummer was unthinkable. So that big procession one morning got in motion.

It was May, and it was hot. Arriving at Mojave, the men took up quarters in a train that had been shunted onto a disused siding—Lillian, Miss Moir and a few others in a flimsy little hotel, opposite the tracks, where engines switched and banged most of the night long. It was a Harvey hotel, which was the best that could be said for it; the food at least would be good. Cool enough at first, the weather presently became unbearably hot. Whereupon a new difficulty presented itself: Film coating melted from the celluloid. No developing could be done with the thermometer at 120 in the shade. They tried freezing the films, but this made them brittle, like thin glass. Finally, they packed them, frozen, and rushed them by special cars to the Metro laboratories, one hundred and forty miles away, to be carefully thawed out.

And the human misery of it! Miss Moir writes:

Quivering veils of heat lay over the desert, there was no shade anywhere, and a burning wind blew all day long, raising blisters on your face, taking every bit of skin off your lips. I shall never forget the appearance of the crew during that picture. To protect their faces from the sun they all wore a heavy blackish make-up while their cracked and swollen lips were covered with some sort of white stuff. Add to this goggles, and handkerchiefs tied round their necks, and you can imagine that most desperate looking gang to be seen anywhere on that desert. When the studio executives saw the first rushes they were so horrified at Lars Hansen’s unromantic appearance that they ordered the whole sequence to be done again and Lars Hansen to appear shaven and clean, as they argued that no girl could possibly entertain romantic thoughts for such a hairy ruffian.

The cowboys added interest and excitement to the adventure. Long, lean blasphemous individuals, reckless of everything, gambling the minute they were not needed for a scene.

To which Lillian adds:

“It was the very worst experience I ever went through. Temperature 120 in the shade. In the sun…? One man burned his hand quite badly opening the door of a motor. We had eight wind machines, and in the studio, to match up with the blowing sand outside (supposed to be blowing in the doors and windows), we used sulphur pots, the smoke giving the effect of sand blowing in. The sand itself was bad enough, but the pots were worse. I was burned all the time, and was in danger of having my eyes put out. The hardships of making ‘Way Down East’ were nothing to it. My hair was burned and nearly ruined by the sulphur smoke. I could not get it clean for months. Such an experience is not justified by any picture.”

Nature seems to have wearied of their evil-smelling feeble devices, and one day gave an example of what she could do herself. Miss Moir, graphically:

A few days before we finished the scenes up there it turned cold. Towards the end of the afternoon work was stopped by a terrific sandstorm. A howling wind, which soon assumed the proportions of a hurricane, tore down from the mountains sending the sand whirling in dense masses before it. The sky was black and everything was obscured by a veil through which we could dimly perceive the figures of the cowboys bent forward on their saddles, horse and rider braced against the oncoming fury, making for camp. There was an extraordinary beauty about the scene, as Lillian and I stood for a moment and watched it before getting into the car, and I could appreciate the feeling in her voice when she said “Oh, how I wish Mr. Griffith was here. How he would have loved to photograph that.”

All night long the storm raged while our shaky little hotel quivered to its foundations. As we lay in bed trying vainly to sleep, we could see the flimsy walls of the hotel bending before the onslaught, and in the morning the room was full of sand which had leaked in through every crevice of the ill-built structure.

This was exactly what they had come up there to produce, but apparently they made no use of it. One remembers Griffith waiting for the blizzard in New England, and echoes Lillian’s heartfelt utterance. The day had come when Nature’s effects were no longer in favor—were even resented, as an imitation; and one who has seen the picture must confess that those eight wind machines were not easily to be outdone.

The most depressing of Lillian’s films, “Wind,” is one of the best—beautiful in its sheer ferocity. Nemirovitch Dantchenko, distinguished manager, playwright and producer, of the Moscow Art Theatre, being then in Hollywood, after a preview of it, wrote as follows:

I want once more to tell you of my admiration of your genius. In that picture, the power and expressiveness of your portrayal begat real tragedy. A combination of the greatest sincerity, brilliance and unvarying charm, places you in the small circle of the first tragediennes of the world.... One feels your great experience and the ripeness of your genius.... It is quite possible that I shall write [of it] again to Russia, where you are the object of great interest and admiration by the people.

“WIND” Letty, burying the man she had killed

For some reason, “Wind” was not released until late in the year. When it finally appeared, the time for it was brief—the talking picture was ready to invade the land—but that story—a sad one—we shall come to a little later.

Lillian’s last silent picture, “The Enemy,” a war picture, laid in Vienna—not very startling—closed her two-year contract with the Metro company. She was to have made six pictures, but they were unable to give them to her. Both sides were satisfied, however, and parted on the pleasantest terms. Only too gladly, Lillian would have made another picture, had conditions been otherwise. The company on its part had no word of complaint, even paid her for one day extra time, something over a thousand dollars, a complete surprise, for she had taken no account of that day.

IX
GOOD-BYE, CALIFORNIA

On the whole, in spite of “Annie Laurie’s” burdensome velvets, in spite of Mojave’s sulphur blasts and blistering sands, it had been—or, but for her mother’s illness, might have been—a happy as well as a profitable two years. Mimi and Hester Prynne had been worth while. “Wind” had been an artistic triumph.

Miss Moir, very close to Lillian during all this period, has left a series of impressions and incidents not directly connected with her work:

I remember the first time I saw her at the Ambassador Hotel, New York, she struck me as a person of perfect poise and great charm of manner in which there was something almost childishly appealing. In many ways she is a paradox. She gives the impression of helplessness when she is really the most resourceful person I know. You think sometimes that she is weak and easily led, and then you suddenly come up against an inflexible will and an iron determination to do what she has set her mind on doing.

Then another picture comes into my mind as I often saw her at parties, sitting uncomfortably in the quietest corner she could find, talking generally to some elderly person until the time came to go home, where she always went as soon as possible.

Her hands are expressive of her whole personality, delicately modelled, yet with a look of latent strength and capability about them. She uses them beautifully.

She has no fidgety movements. She is one of the few women I know who have learned the art of perfect stillness.

She loves fortune tellers, though she doesn’t take them seriously and generally forgets what they have told her, five minutes after leaving them.

Our entire life in California on looking back, seems to have its centre in the room where poor Mrs. Gish sat, patient and speechless, looking forward to the moment when Lillian would get back from the studio. On her Birthday morning her room was so crowded with presents it looked like a giftshop. She was delighted with everything, and seemed to take a turn for the better from that day. Until then she had seemed to be losing interest in life—slipping away from us. Having once aroused her from this lethargy Lillian’s whole endeavor was spent on keeping her mother amused. She was constantly coming home with some lovely thing for her—a pretty bed-jacket, a taffeta quilt for her bed, an exquisite set of china for her breakfast tray.

Mr. Mencken came for dinner one Sunday night. I remember we were all a little bit worried about entertaining such a distinguished guest, but we needn’t have been because he seemed to enjoy everything with the zest of a schoolboy.

I have somewhat different memories of the night Mr. Hergesheimer came to dine. Dinner was set for 7:30; Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks arrived, but no Mr. Hergesheimer. Half an hour and then three-quarters of an hour went by—still he did not appear. Finally the telephone rang and a desperate voice called over the wire. It was Mr. Hergesheimer: somehow or other he had gone to the house which Lillian had rented the previous year, and had been unable sooner to locate her present abode. He arrived quite out of breath, an hour late, and considerably disturbed.

One of the pleasantest recollections I have of California is the evening Lillian and I went to a “bowl” concert just a week or so before coming East for good. It was a night of brilliant moonlight, unusually warm for that climate and perfect for a concert in the open air. I remember as we drove homeward after it was all over, that we talked of our years together in California, of all the drama and comedy we had shared there, and agreed that it hadn’t been such an unpleasant time after all.

Then, presently, they were off for New York; Lillian, her Mother; the nurse, Miss Davies; Miss Moir; John, the poll-parrot, which they had got twelve years before at Denishawn; two dogs; three canary-birds, and a bus-load of hand luggage.

As usual, Lillian had worked up to the last minute, had made one or more scenes of “The Enemy” the morning of her departure. Little she guessed, when she walked out of the studio, that those were the last scenes in silent pictures she would ever make, that all unsuspected, another beautiful craft was about to be relegated to that limbo of outworn things which holds the painted panorama and the wood engraving. During fifteen years, she had been a unique figure in an industry which she had watched grow, almost from infancy, to a mighty maturity, and which was now at the moment of dissolution. That Lillian did not see this is not surprising, but that the great producers, with ears supposedly close to the ground, their research departments always alert, should have taken so little account of the warning voices (literally that), is astonishing.

Of Lillian’s pictures, I believe there are three on which her screen fame rests. In many there are distinguished scenes: in “The White Sister,” for instance; in “Romola,” in “Wind,” and in “Way Down East.” But of those which were consistently good, I should name, in order, “Broken Blossoms,” “La Bohême” and “The Scarlet Letter” as those for which she will be longest remembered: and this because of their exquisite beauty and their suitability to her special gifts.

As to what Lillian did for the picture world, I am troubled by a lack of knowledge. There are moments when it would seem that very little has been done for it, by anybody. I suspect, however, that she did more than now appears. She had a wide following among the picture players, to whom, through example alone, she must have taught restraint, delicacy—in a word, good manners. In a hundred pages I could not say more, or wish to.

X
REINHARDT

Lillian, at the Drake Hotel, in New York was kept busy declining offers of engagements—ranging from vaudeville through matrimony and pictures to the so-called legitimate stage. Maurice Maeterlinck wrote to a friend:

I should be all the more happy to undertake the scenario you speak of, in that it concerns Lillian Gish, who is the great star of the cinema that, among all, I admire, for no other has so much talent, or is so natural, so sympathetic, so moving.³

Lillian concluded a contract with the United Artists for three pictures, to be directed by Max Reinhardt, foremost director and producer of Europe. The company had a contract with Reinhardt, and it was on their promise that he should direct her, that Lillian signed with them. Her plan had had its inception a year earlier, she said, during a visit of Reinhardt’s to Los Angeles.

“My connection with Reinhardt was this: In 1923-24, I had seen his stage production of ‘The Miracle,’ with Lady Diana Manners and Rosamond Pinchot. Morris Gest brought it over, and at the time had asked me to play the part of the nun. Reinhardt, who had seen something of mine—I suppose ‘The White Sister’—had suggested this. I could not do it because of my contract. I was then on the eve of returning to Italy, to make ‘Romola.’

“I did not meet Reinhardt until he was in California, with ‘The Miracle.’ With Rudolph Kommer and Karl von Mueller he came out to our Santa Monica house, for luncheon. Before luncheon we went to the studio and ran, I think, ‘Broken Blossoms.’ Then, in the afternoon, ‘La Bohême’ and ‘The Scarlet Letter.’ They seemed to please him. He spoke no English, and I spoke no German, at the time. Kommer served as interpreter. It was then that Reinhardt suggested that we might work together. He had never made a picture, but was eager to try. He had spent thirty-five years in the theatre, and was tired of it. He had theatres in Berlin and Vienna, the finest in Europe.”

From Kansas City, Reinhardt and Kommer telegraphed:

Once more we want to thank you for that most fascinating Sunday you gave us. We greet you as the supreme emotional actress of the screen and hope fervently that the near future will bring us in closer contact on the stage and on the screen. Please do not forget Salzburg when you come to Europe. We shall be waiting for you.

Salzburg was Reinhardt’s home, where in an ancient castle, Leopoldskron, he kept open house, for a horde of congenial guests. Reinhardt and Kommer had spoken of a picture they would prepare when she came to New York. Now, at the Drake Hotel, they started on a story for it. Reinhardt, meantime, had brought over a company and was producing “Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “Danton’s Todt.”

Reinhardt, Lillian said, talked to her about Theresa Neumann, the peasant miracle girl of Konnersreuth, who on every Friday except feast days went through the entire sufferings of Christ, the blood trickling from stigmata on her forehead, her hands and her feet. Nobody but those who have seen it will believe it, but her case is a very celebrated one, and has been studied by scientists of Germany and Austria, and of other countries. Reinhardt believed that a great miracle picture could be based on the case of Theresa Neumann, and Lillian agreed with him. She would come to Leopoldskron, and would go to see Theresa Neumann for herself. “I must do that, of course,” she said, “and familiarize myself with the lives of the peasantry of which she was one.”

“In April, Mother, Miss Davies and I sailed for Hamburg. We arrived at Cuxhaven early one morning. Mother had to be carried to the train and to a private car. Reinhardt was already over there. His secretary met us, and Mr. Melnitz, head of the United Artists in Germany.

“At Hamburg, we put Mother to bed for two hours. She had been up since half-past four. Nurse and I had not slept all night. We took train for Berlin, arriving at six in the evening. I had not realized that Germany is like America in the matter of news. I supposed we would go in quietly. Instead, we found the station literally jammed with people, all trying to get around us. It was terribly hard on poor Mother.”

There were a dozen or two camera-men, and when they found they couldn’t all take pictures of Lillian, they got around Mrs. Gish, who was in a big chair carried with poles. She could not tell them that she did not want her picture taken, and began to cry. When at last they got into an automobile, all the camera-men and reporters jumped into other cars and came racing behind, taking pictures all the way to the hotel. During the next few days, Lillian was too nervous to give more than a few interviews. Reinhardt comforted her by saying that no artist ever had come into Germany with such a reception from the press.

At Berlin Lillian consulted Professor Vogt, head of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, supposed to know more than anyone else about cases like her mother’s. Professor Vogt said he could not do very much for Mrs. Gish, but warned Lillian that she herself was likely to be headed in the same direction. He advised that her mother be taken to Doctor Sinn’s Sanatorium at Neubabelsburg, advice promptly followed. Mrs. Gish remained there a year.

To Lillian, in Berlin, came this letter:

O smallest blonde:

You must not think of any other place but Leopoldskron! Max Reinhardt and we all would think that we had failed completely to please you. Besides, the hotels are now terribly over-crowded and you would be perfectly miserable there. So please, do overcome any inhibitions, and come to Leopoldskron! I am expecting your wire about train and hour.

We are just having Anthony Asquith and Elizabeth Bibesco here. This means that the whole castle is one flaming song in gloriam Lilliane Gish....

I do hope that Professor Vogt will entirely satisfy the expectations of your poor mother. My sincerest wishes and regards to her … Schloss Kommer and Salzburg are sending you loving greetings. Au revoir! Yours ever,

R. K. Kommer

“I went to Salzburg,” Lillian said, “to Leopoldskron. Reinhardt and his secretary, Miss Adler, were on the train, and Kommer was at the station to meet us. Leopoldskron is a huge place, a little way out of Salzburg, built hundreds of years ago. I don’t know how many rooms it has, but only candles were used to light them. I was much impressed when we drove up to it, and when we got inside. There were ever so many guests, distinguished persons from everywhere. It is like a great hotel, and has three dining-rooms. Among the guests, was the poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who had come to work on the story we had planned for our picture. Kommer got me a maid, Josephine, whom I afterwards brought to America.

“We worked three weeks on our story, that time; then I went to Paris for a fortnight, then to Mother at Neubabelsburg. Later I went to Leopoldskron for another three weeks, to meet Mr. Joe Schenck, who had come over to hear the story. Frances Marion was in Salzburg by that time. She said we had a wonderful theme. Schenck also liked it—said we should get back to Hollywood as quickly as possible, and make it. Possibly he suspected that something was likely to happen—something like an earthquake in the picture world. Off there in that corner of Austria, we never dreamed of it.

“I was anxious to see something of Austrian peasant life at close range. At Leopoldskron was the artist Feistauer. He himself was a peasant, and he asked me to pose for him. So we made a bargain. I agreed that if he and his wife would go with me, I would get a car, pay the expenses of the trip and he could take us to the part of the country he knew. If he would do this, I would pose for him. He was quite willing, and we arranged our party. There were five of us besides the chauffeur: Feistauer and his wife; von Hofmannsthal’s son Raymond; myself, and Josephine, my maid.

“It was a wonderful experience. I saw peasant life as I should never have seen it otherwise. We would stay a day and a night in a peasant house—huge houses they had, like those in the Schwartzwald, with their animals in one part of it. Their food was a coarse bread, milk and potatoes, placed on a kind of framework in the middle of the table. I was so impressed with it all—different from anything I had ever seen:—the great room below, the small chambers above. The combined living-room and kitchen was sometimes very beautiful. The great cooking-stoves so unlike any I had known. Beautiful, too, because primitive.

“We came one day to a house where a man walked out to meet us, carrying a child in his arms, leading another. I thought he had the most wonderful face I had ever seen, a perfect Christus. He was followed by some geese, two dogs and a baby lamb. He came up and greeted us with the word they use with strangers, ‘Christgott,’ and led us to the house. He apparently knew Feistauer, but his greeting to him was the same as to us. We sat down for a little; then he took Raymond and myself through the house. We were there perhaps an hour in all. When he had gone I said to Feistauer: ‘If you should ever wish to paint the Christus, I should think you would use that man. He is nearer my idea of the Christ than anyone I have ever seen.’ Feistauer said: ‘I have done so, often. He is my brother!’ Because Feistauer had given up the land to be a painter in town, he was, in a sense, an outcast, a stranger—no more than any other of our party.

“It was at the end of my second visit to Salzburg that I saw the miracle girl, Theresa Neumann—at Konnersreuth. I was on the way to see Mother again, and stopped off there. She was to be the subject of our picture, and it was very necessary that I see her. No one is allowed to do so without special permission. I had letters from the Archbishop of Regensburg. Josephine, my maid, went with me.

“I found poor, the very poorest, accommodations in the peasant village where Theresa Neumann lived. She is just a peasant girl herself, the eldest of eleven children, about thirty years old when I was there. Hundreds try to see her, but only members of the clergy, or those with special permits, can get near her on the days of the miracle. There is no charge of any sort, and her people are very poor, helped a little by the Church.

“It is the most amazing sight in the world. Her ecstasy begins about one o’clock Friday morning, and lasts until noon. The wounds, which are closed and black between times, open, and blood flows from them—from those on her hands and feet, from the spear-wound in her side, and the thorn-wounds on her forehead. Tears of blood drip from her eyes, run down her cheeks, and stain her white gown. I was within three feet of her, and saw all this. I don’t expect anyone to believe these things, but I saw them, exactly as I have said, and if it is trickery, it is beyond anything of the sort I have ever heard of. I asked her to pray for Mother, and I believe she did. Mother got better, so it may have helped.

“The miracle has been accounted for in many ways, both by skeptics and believers. The believer, a priest, who talked about it to me, called her a ‘child of grace,’ which may be as good an explanation as any, if one knew what it meant. Dozens of books have been written about her. Perhaps she is all mind, but that seems a poor explanation. It is claimed that she has not taken food or drink for a number of years. Incredible, of course, but no more so than the things I saw.”