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176 IT TOOK NINE TAILORS
six is really an excellent average, but once you become a star, you naturally want every picture to be a box-office smash, for your continued stardom depends on those box-office grosses. No matter how much the critics and the public may like your individual performance, if your pictures begin to slip at the box office, Hollywood grows very disinterested in you.
I wanted another picture like The Grand Duchess and the Waiter and The King on Main Street, which were sophisticated comedies. But instead the studio offered me the lead in a piece of smorgasbord called The Sorrows of Satan, a novel by Marie Corelli. The director was to be D. W. Griffith.
Griffith wanted me to play the part of the devil, who appears on earth in the guise of a wealthy and sophisticated man and tempts a struggling young artist into debasing his art for the sake of material things. I asked to see the shooting script because this sounded like pretty ordinary stuff to me. I was told that Griffith never shot from a script, so all I could read was the book. I read the book and didn't like it.
The devil has always been a great actor's role in every play in which he has ever appeared, from Faustus to The Black Crook. Certainly it is a part that any actor should enjoy playing, but those months I spent making The Sorrows of Satan were the unhappiest I have ever experienced in this business I love.
As I have already said, there were no scripts for the actors. We met every morning in a hall above Keen's Chop House, where Mr. Griffith would explain what we were to do, and then we would rehearse. Interminable hours were spent rehearsing and changing very dull and uninteresting scenes. In the afternoons we went to the studio and shot and reshot. I suspected very quickly that we had a "turkey," for I had an infallible barometer—my stomach. It began aching worse than ever before.
"The Sorrows of Satan," I told Hank, "is going to turn out to be The Sorrows of Zukor."
But the studio executives were all sure it would be a great picture. After all, they had a best seller for a story; they had