Photoplay (Jul - Dec 1931)

Two of this vivid company — Clarine Seymour (one of the most sparkling, avid women who ever lived) and Bobby Harron are dead. Various fates have pursued the rest. They are scattered now across the face of the earth. There was a stir, as if a god had suddenly appeared, when Griffith entered the room — a sort of general awareness, a brisk sprucing up. He motioned my mother to a chair among the great and beckoned Bobby Harron to come to us. Briefly he introduced us and then he turned to me: " Now, you're supposed to be a little country girl in Kentucky, let us say, and this boy is your sweetheart. You and Bobby are walking down the road hand in hand. I'll tell you what to do as we go on." He sat down, leaving me to face all those famous eyes, Bobby Harron standing beside me. My first day in a studio, my first glimpse of a director and film stars, and I found myself enacting a part. Always ahead of his time, it was Griffith's habit, I later discovered, to rehearse an entire production in the projection room, without props, without costumes, before a single camera was turned. Unheard of in those days, this is now the procedure with every big production. I thought for a brief second that I should die right then, but I had read interviews about what being a trouper meant. "The show must go on," said I to myself, and, as if I were a robot, I felt Bobby Harron take my hand and somehow my legs seemed to move, I don't know how, across the floor of the little projection room. Then, suddenly, a strange thing seemed to happen. Griffith's voice, a rich, deep, very beautiful voice, droned on, telling us what we were to do. "Now you stop by a tree. It's an apple tree. You pick up an apple, Bobby, and hand it to her. Don't forget you love her very much," etc., etc., etc. And the room and all those people seemed to fade away and I found myself actually on a Kentucky road, actually under an apple tree, not acting a part, not being spoken to by the great Griffith but living, really being, the girl I was playing. (What a fool I was!) BOBBY stooped and handed me the imaginary apple. He took an imaginary knife from his pocket and peeled it. I took the peelings from him and threw them over my left shoulder. Griffith suddenly stopped me: "What are you doing?" "Why, you see," I explained, "you throw the apple peeling over your left shoulder and it falls in the shape of an initial. That's the initial of the man you're going to marry." Griffith smiled. He turned to Lillian Gish, who sat on his right, and my mother heard him say, "The kid's got it." Bobby Harron, "the sweetest of them all" and Clarine Seymour, "who had the most to give," both of whom passed away in youth, in Griffith's "True Heart Susie" produced twelve years ago The self-told story of a little girl who won a master director's notice but nevertheless got lost in the mad Hollywood shuffle Richard Barthelmess, "much too big for his breeches," and Dorothy Gish, who had a temper, in "Peppy Polly," a Griffith comedy made around a dozen years ago Presently, during the course of rehearsal, Eugenie Besserer was called in to play the part of my mother. During our impromptu conversation— we made up our own lines ;is they came to us — she asked me a question and I answered, "Yes'um." Clarine Seymour laughed, "What did she say?" she called out. "She said," answered Griffith, "what any well brought up Southern child would say. S h e s a i d 'Yes'um.'" They all laughed. From then on I was "Little Miss Yes'um" around the studio. When the picture was released— Lillian Gish played the part in which I had rehearsed — it was called "The Greatest Question, The Story of Little Miss Yes'um." Griffith, with the octopus-like quality of every great artist, would take from the humblest. He wanted, above all else, naturalness. The apple peel stuff was in the picture, too. Well, that was my introduction to Hollywood. That was my baptism of fire. The Griffith studio, I was later to discover, was the strangest of all. There was a quiet dignity about it. People were called by their last names — a habit which Hollywood scorns — and a Miss or Mister was put before them. We rehearsed for weeks with Clarine Seymour, Carol Dempster and I taking turns playing the leading role. Lillian Gish always sat by. She wore simple organdie frocks and a big white hat through the crown of which a ribbon was run. She wore the same hat but changed the ribbon to match each frock. She always sat, with that strange absorption which characterizes her, never moving, never taking her eyes from the girls who played the part. I DO not know whether Griffith knew the part was to be Miss Lillian's and was only seeing what the others did with it to take the best of each performance, or whether he was actually contemplating one of us. At any rate Miss Lillian did not rehearse. She simply sat watching, her pale blue eyes absorbing every gesture that the other girls made. If Griffith arrived at nine o'clock to begin rehearsals we knew that we would stop for lunch at half-past twelve. If he did not arrive until eleven it meant that we'd work until three before stopping, because he had had his breakfast late and was not hungry. When he was hungry he turned to his assistant director (his name was George Bcranger then, he is now Andre Beranger and plays character roles) and said, "Tell them they may cat." Often, in the middle of a scene, Griffith would leave the set and be gone — no [ r-LEASE TURN TO PAGE 118]