Star maker : the story of D. W. Griffith (1959)

11^ Star Maker do something worth-while. There was that manuscript which was to establish him as the American Ibsen— The Treadmill. Its great theme would rock the thinking world; the theme that man was an encumbrance on the earth and that he would wreck the planet and perish with it. When interviewers came to see him, he told as little as possible about himself; when he spoke of his early days he said he was from Louisville, Kentucky, where he had worked on a paper. Sometimes he told the interviewers he had been an actor, but spoke of this only briefly. He became sensitive about his age and gave out that he was born in 1880. Word came that his mother was not well. She had never liked Louisville and wanted to go back to the old farm, but that had been gone many years. But she could return to early surroundings and her old friends, so he bought a house for her in LaGrange, six miles from the old homestead and twenty miles from Louisville. As soon as he got to Louisville, he was the center of interest. He had been something of a mystery. After he'd left, little had been known about him, except that he was actm' in travelin' shows. Then he'd got "mixed up" in the movies— no one knew in exactly what way. But now he was back. He was famous. He was rich. He walked along the streets where he had pegged so many times. He went to the house on West Chestnut Street where the family had lived when they had come from the farm. How small it seemed. He went to 930 Fifth Street. Why! This was where he was living when he had been a member of the Meffert Stock Company and had been told that to be a great playwright one must have been an actor. He went to the public library where he had read Browning and Walt Whitman and