Take One (Sep-Oct 1973)

heard him cuss out Hal Roach and walk out of the studio, yelling, ‘To Hell with you and your damn studio, too." He was getting about $6,000 a week there. | don't believe for $6,000 a week | would have cussed the man.” Frank Capra remembers that after the Roach fiasco, Griffith remained in Hollywood, “trying to get work, but it didn’t work out for him.” Capra also remembers what a sad figure Griffith was at this point in his life. “He was considered — and this is awful to say — but he was considered kind of a joke,” Capra says. “He had this grandiose way of talking — rhetorical style. At this time, there were no independent productions, and he wanted to make everything his own way. Well, nobody had that privilege, except maybe me, because | worked in a very small studio [Columbia] where | could get that privilege. Griffith wanted to spend somebody's money, and, of course, his last few pictures were absolute duds. He was considered a bore and a joke and nobody wanted to listen to him because he was a poor, old has-been trying to make it again. He just couldn't get into anybody's office to talk to them, or if he did, they'd give him the bum'’s rush as soon as possible. He felt it, and he just kept drinking more and more. | think he had a certain sense of bitterness, but he was quite a big man, and | think he understood what was happening around him better than anybody there. He didn't go around berating people — he'd just quietly drink himself to sleep.” Griffith and his wife made the Roosevelt Hotel their new home, and he continued to busy himself with writing projects. Evelyn Baldwin’ says that Griffith was not bitter toward this new Hollywood because “He was not one to harbor grudges or bitterness, but he was disappointed. There were things he would still liked to have done, but there was no opportunity.” Why was that? How had Griffith, once the most celebrated director in the country — perhaps the world — arrived at the sorry place he was now? Theories are diverse: He drank so much that he became unreliable; he had exhausted the bank of personal experience from which he made his films; that after he introduced the basic techniques of filmmaking, other men, some of whom — Raoul Walsh, Sidney Franklin, Erich von Stroheim — had been his assistants, refined them to a further degree; that he wouldn't — or couldn't — make spectacles which exploited women, bathtubs and gin; that he left his management in inept hands; that when the movies became an industry, the “one man, one film" concept died. And there are other theories, but they all come down to the fact that Griffith was too proud — or too stubborn — to do anything any way except the way he wanted. “They wanted him to work for them, and he was a man who couldn't take orders,” Lillian Gish explains. “He had his 28 own ideas and he had to make it his way. When pictures would change and someone would have a success, they wanted him to make something similar to that, and he was a leader and not a follower.” In the late 30s, Griffith donated many of his films and his pressbooks to the Museum of Modern Art. He was delighted someone wanted them. A few years earlier, when the D.W. Griffith Corp. went bankrupt, he was the highest bidder (at $500) for the rights to 21 of his films. In 1940, he left Hollywood to attend a museum-sponsored Griffith retrospective in New York. When he appeared at the museum to help restore Intolerance, he found his old friend Billy Bitzer employed to collate materials from the Biograph era. The New York press gave the retrospective much publicity, and Griffith was confident that someone, somewhere, would read about it and offer him a job. They didn't, and he returned to the Roosevelt Hotel. When the hotel began renovating, the Griffiths bought a small stucco house in the less-fashionable part of Beverly Hills. Griffith, who preferred hotel life and had lived most of his life in second-rate hotels, hated the house and the noise from the nearby highway. That, combined with his frustrations, caused him to drink more and more, and to fight with Evelyn. “One night he had too much to drink and they really got into it. Whew!,” Richard Reynolds remembered. Finally, in 1947, Evelyn could take no more, and asked Griffith to leave. She soon filed for divorce, and obtained an interlocutory decree. Evelyn has remarried, but still keeps up with Griffith's relatives, sending them Christmas cards and sympathy notes as time takes its toll on the Griffith family. And when Francis Oglesby’s daughter married in New York, Evelyn was there. Griffith spent the next year living alone in the Knickerbocker Hotel. He was occasionally seen aimlessly walking the streets in wrinkled, ill-fitting clothing, staring into shop windows and leaning on his cane. His mailbox was stuffed with letters he never read, and he refused to talk with almost everyone. However, one reporter, Ezra Goodman, of New York's PM, succeeded in getting an interview. In it, Griffith, whom Goodman found guzzling gin from a water tumbler and periodically grabbing at the young blonde sitting opposite him, appears a far more pathetic figure than any of his movie characters. “It was Griffith, all right, his lordly, arrogant, aquiline features surmounted by sparse white hair, attired in pajamas anda patterned maroon dressing gown, and at the age of 73, sitting alone, drunk and almost forgotten in a hotel room in the town he had been instrumental in putting on the map.” On July 22, 1948, while alone in his room, he suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage. He managed to stumble down to the lobby and was taken to Temple Hospital, where he died the next day. Under his bed, someone found his cane, the wide-brimmed hat he wore all through the making of The Birth and a manuscript he had worked on for more than 40 years. “| Know he never felt he achieved what he wanted to achieve in life,’’ Evelyn Baldwin says. When Mae Marsh and John Ford arrived at the funeral home, they learned that only four people had come to pay their respects. One was C.B. DeMille, who had said, "Griffith was the teacher of us all. | wasn’t worthy of tying his shoe strings.” About 300 of Hollywood's most famous showed up at the memorial service for him, because — according to Frank Capra — “there were a lot of photographers there.” Much has been made of the idea that Griffith died broke. Apparently, it isn't true. Griffith received $30,000 annually from annuities, and left an estate reported at a little less than $50,000. Eleven years after his death, $17,000 was apportioned to four nieces, two nephews and four grand-nieces. So, as Adolph Zukor said, if Griffith went around in bad shoes and old clothes, it was because he was a shabby dresser — not because he couldn't afford better. And so he ended where he began. His relatives flew him back to Kentucky and buried him in the family plot, next to Col. Jake and Mary, only a few yards from the site of the Methodist church he had attended as a boy. In 1949, A.H. Miles, a theater owner in Eminence, Ky., wrote an article in Box Office saying nobody much ever visited Griffith's grave because few knew where it was. Raoul Walsh — John Wilkes Booth in The Birth of a Nation — flew down to Kentucky and found the grave poorly marked. In 1950, the Screen Directors Guild transfered Griffith to another part of the cemetery and surrounded the plot with a rail fence said to be from the original Griffith farm, because, as Griffith's niece remembers, “He was crazy about rail fences.’”’ Perhaps to soothe Hollywood's conscience, the guild marked the grave with a handsome marble stone decorated with the guild medallion. Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford, Richard Barthelmess and Evelyn Baldwin attended the ceremony. Fourteen years later, the state historical society put up a marker alongside the road. On the evening of the 25th anniversary of Griffith's death, | picked a white rose from my garden and drove out to the country to place it next to the wreaths | expected others would have sent. When | got there, | was glad | had taken the flower; his grave was completely bare. As | laid the rose on the memorial stone and watched the sun set over the land that Mary Griffith and her children plowed long ago, | noticed the rail fence around the grave had begun to fall apart. | could only hope it had been done not by nature, but by souvenir hunters who wanted something by which [END] to remember D.W. Griffith.