When the movies were young (1925)

176 When the Movies were Young with the Closed Shutters the brother pays through bitter years the price of his cowardice. All our old stamping grounds we revisited this summer. At the Atlantic Highlands we did two pictures: one, "A Salutary Lesson," with Marion Leonard; and the other, "The Sorrows of the Unfaithful," with Mary Pickford. At Paterson, New Jersey, we found a feudal castle. It belonged to one Mr. Lambert, a silk manufacturer. Here we did "The Call to Arms" where little Mary donned tights for the first and only time, playing a page, and looking picturesque on a medieval horse, but being a very unhappy Mary for a reason that none of us knew. How she fussed about those tights — nearly shed tears. She sat on the lawn all wrapped up in the generous folds of her velvet cape, and wouldn't budge until she was called for her scene, and she talked so strangely. For Owen was there, and all the other actors were to see her in the tights, and Mary and Owen had a secret — a secret that made such a situation quite unbearable. She had confided it only to "Doc," but the rest of us had been wondering. What a miserable, hot, muggy day it was. Tolerable only sitting on the grassy slopes of the Lambert estate, but how awful in the rooms of the little frame hotel over by the railroad tracks where we had made up and where some of the actors were still awaiting orders as to how they should dress. Dell Henderson, who was assisting Mr. Griffith on this picture, was laboring back and forth from the castle to the hotel bringing orders to the waiting actors as they were needed. Sennett was one of the waiting ones, and he was all humped up in his pet grouch when Dell entered and said, "Here, Sennett, the boss says for you to don this armor."