When the movies were young (1925)

1 6 When the Movies were Young However, Mr. Griffith soon returned to San Francisco. He hoped to do something with his playlet. Martin Beck, the vaudeville magnate, who was then manager of the Orpheum Theatre and booked acts over the Orpheum Circuit, said to let him see a rehearsal. Such excitement! I was to play a little Colonial girl and appear at our own Orpheum Theatre in an act that had played New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and other awesome cities. Mr. Beck booked for the week and gave us a good salary, but could not offer enough consecutive bookings to make a road tour pay, so that was that. In the meantime Oliver Morosco had opened his beautiful Majestic Theatre in upper Market Street, with "In the Palace of the King." The New York company lacking a blind Inez, I got the part, and the dramatic critic, Ashton Stevens, gave me a great notice. In the next week's bill, "Captain Barrington," I played a scene which brought me a paragraph from Mr. Stevens captioned "An Actress with more than Looks." On the strength of this notice Mr. Morosco sent me to play ingenues at his Burbank Theatre in Los Angeles, at twenty-five dollars per week. Barney Bernard was stepping out just now. He wanted to see what he could do away from the musical skits of Kolb and Dill. So he found a play called "The Financier." "Lawrence" Griffith had a little job in it. The hardest part of the job was to smoke a cigar in a scene — it nearly made him ill. But he had a good season, six weeks with salary paid. That over, came a call to Los Angeles to portray the Indian, Alessandro, in a dramatization of Helen Hunt Jackson's famous novel "Ramona."