Life and Lillian Gish
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Lillian watched it almost without a word. I think she approved her part in it, and why not? Technically, she was at her best. We drove home rather silently.
“It was the exact opposite of ‘Broken Blossoms,’” I ventured to say.
“You mean …”
“That that was sheer beauty, while this–”
“But this had beauty, too, don’t you think?”
“Great beauty. The illusion of blowing sand … Letty’s cumulative terror of it—those were classic things. But I cannot imagine going through the torture of seeing it again. The ending didn’t save it.”
“No. I wanted it to end with her complete madness … with her rushing out into the wind … vanishing in the storm. They wouldn’t let me.”
“They thought they were giving it a happy ending.”
“I suppose so.”
We saw one more picture after that, “The Enemy,” her last silent film, and our winter was at an end—a winter during which, by a form of “eternal recurrence,” exactly symbolic of Ouspensky’s “duplicate reincarnations of the past” I had watched her relive the years, change from the young girl who had played Elsie Stoneman to the mature and finished actress of “Wind,” of “One Romantic Night,” of Chekhov’s Helena.
And in watching I seemed to guess something of her secret. Chiefly, as I believe, it lies in the fact that she does not do violence to herself by making herself over into the part she presents. She studies the environment, the period, the hundred contributing details of the situation, then lives her part in the play as she might have lived it in reality. She takes on the psychology of it—what she conceives to be such—and in some subtle fashion, fuses it with her own. Always, it is Lillian who is playing, and always you want it to be Lillian, just as all those people she has played—Hester Prynne, Mimi, the White Sister, poor little Lucy Burrows, and Helena—would wish to be Lillian, if they could see her in their parts. And the nearer they could be like her, the better White Sister and Hester Prynne and Helena and the rest, they would make. I am not saying that hers is the best dramatic method—my equipment does not warrant that positive statement—I am only saying that the effect she gives us is not of acting, but of life itself.
Sometimes I feel that I have dwelt overmuch on the subject of Lillian’s beauty; again, I feel that I have said very little. It is such a tremendous thing when considered in its relation to her material being—such a baffling thing. She is not richly proportioned. In height five feet four and one half inches, her weight is one hundred and ten pounds. True, her slender feet are small, her limbs shapely; but her arms are full long, her expressive hands rather large, her shoulders narrow, her bust that of a young girl. It is strange, but these very defects—defects in another—add to the charm that surrounds her like an aureola. Her face—I cannot write about her face—I suppose the classic purist might take it to pieces, discovering a variety of faults. Let him do so. In doing it he will miss Lillian altogether—her beauty and the magic of it. It has often been likened to music, the strains of Debussy, which is well enough, as far as it goes, and I have found it in the heart cry of Mascagni’s “Intermezzo,” in the “Eve of St. Agnes,” in the dying fall of the “Londonderry Air.” To say that it is spiritual only partly tells the story. It is that, but it is something more. It has a haunting eerie quality that has to do with elfland, and lonely moors—the face that seen by the homing lad at evening leaves him forever undone. Scores of men and women, too, have written of it, have felt its strangeness. Some have tried to write of it lightly, but underneath you feel the magic working. They have glimpsed “Diana’s silver horn,” and are forever changed.
“CAMILLE”
VII
A FEW NOTES
In my notebook of this time I find these entries:
March 31, 1931: She has returned from a brief stay at Atlantic City. “I read ‘Arrowsmith,’” she said. “I think it a fine book.
“I remembered something while I was there: something from my childhood: I remembered Papa taking Dorothy and me there, once; I think we stayed there overnight. I know we paddled in the water on the beach. How strange, when my memory is so poor, that this should come back to me, after all these years. I think we went from New York, so it must have been just after Baltimore, when I was about five.”
No date: How tolerant she is! Whatever her belief or habits, she never urges them upon others, or tries to disintegrate theirs. She never smoked a cigarette in her life, but for years she has lived in a drift of tobacco, without objection or criticism. She drinks nothing stronger than mild wine, but provides generously for her guests.
April 5: Artists are always wanting to paint Lillian. Just now she is posing for Sorine, the distinguished Russian painter who did the Pavlowa which hangs in the Luxembourg. Lillian’s portrait is to hang there, he says, and some day in the Louvre. I saw it today, with her. It is vividly, delicately done.
No date: Today she said: “I attended a symphony concert, last night, with some friends. In the box with us was Gabrilowitsch. I thought of what the music meant to him that it did not mean to me. What he heard that missed me entirely. Musicians have an entire world of their own. No other art has that in the same degree. Science has it, I suppose. But music seems different,—of a world still farther removed.”
April 15: How does she find time for all the things she does? She has no secretary, now, yet somehow keeps up conscientiously with her letter answering—of itself a heavy task. Then, home duties, social demands, this posing every day for Sorine; also, for a young German girl, Fräulein von Bismarck; reading plays; this work of ours, which takes no end of time, and thought. I don’t see how she manages it all—but she does.
I suppose things trouble her, but she remains serene. There is about her a detachment from the worries of life that suggests Karma Yoga, and is that, I have no doubt, for she is versed in Eastern Philosophy.
Whether she “suffers fools gladly,” or not, I do not know. I only know that she suffers them—without complaint.
She reads omnivorously, but always, as I think, seeking the best, and apparently reading with care and reflection.
A few days ago I lent her Brand Whitlock’s latest book, “Narcissus,” which tells a Belgian legend of Van Dyck. Today she said: “I read it twice—for the story, first, then for the beauty of it—the style. It has great charm. I want to read it again.” Then she told me a story of Van Dyck and Frans Hals, which somewhere she had read, or heard.
April, 1932. Something has happened, or is in the process of happening. Since the conclusion of “Uncle Vanya” Lillian has given little serious consideration to theatrical matters, putting aside as unsuitable a variety of offered parts. A new prospect now presents itself—one that appeals to her taste and imagination: a group of influential citizens of Denver, Colorado, headed by Mr. Delos Chappell, propose to refurbish and reopen the ancient Opera House of the little “ghost mining town” of Central City, with a week’s presentation of “Camille,” at fancy prices, for the benefit of the University of Denver. Robert Edmond Jones is to stage and direct the production, with Lillian as Casting Director, herself in the title rôle. She is deeply interested—has secured Raymond Hackett for the part of Armand, the rehearsing to begin at once.
From a special to The New York TimesDenver, Col., July 16.—In an impressive ceremony, amid the merry laughter of “pioneer” belles and gay young men, and at a cost of $250,000, the famous Central City Opera House was brought to life tonight after a silence of fifty years.
Men, women and children from the Atlantic Seaboard and the Pacific Coast came to this “phantom” village, once the miners’ capital. Daughters and sons, granddaughters and grandsons of pioneers who once made those same walls vibrate with their applause were there for the gala opening of the revival, in dress such as their ancestors wore at the theatre when it was new. Some of the gowns, handed down through the fifty years, were once heard to rustle down those same aisles. Every person in the audience represented some famous character of the time when Central City was the centre of Colorado’s gold mining industry. “Camille” typified to perfection the taste of the ’80s in the theatre.
Miss Lillian Gish, as Marguerite Gautier, takes the leading rôle, with Raymond Hackett playing opposite her as Armand. It was the first time “Camille” has played in the old opera house in fifty years.
VIII
L’ENVOI
And so, at last, the plowman, turning the furrows of life, comes to the boundary that divides the known from the unknown—the wilderness from the sown field. Whatever we may one day find beyond, is already there in every detail—only, I lack the clairvoyant gift, and turn for a brief backward glimpse. It is no vision of artistic triumph that comes to me tonight … not the memory of Chekhov’s radiant heroine … not the triste picture of that broken flower of the Limehouse … something even more real than these: a real child, trouping with wandering players, away from a mother’s care … a slim-legged little girl, who slept on station benches and telegraph tables, who running across a foot-bridge lost her poor possessions in the swift black water, who from a train or hotel window stared silently into the night.
“What are you looking at, Lillian?”
“Nothing, Aunt Alice, just looking.”
1
Published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
2
“Lillian Gish, An Interpretation”: Number Seven, University of Washington Chapbooks. Edited by Glenn Hughes (1927).
3
“Je serais d’autant plus heureux d’entreprendre le scénario dont vous m’avez parlé, qu’il s’agit de Lillian Gish, qui est la grande vedette du cinéma que j’admire entre toutes, car aucune autre n’a autant de talent, n’est aussi naturelle, aussi sympathique, aussi émouvante.”
4
Lillian herself was more or less responsible for “Coquette.” In a letter of Sept. 17, 1928, Mary wrote her: “I remember, dear, you were the first to tell me to do ‘Coquette.’ If it turns out well, it will be the second time in my career that you have helped me bridge a difficult place.” Lillian’s suggestion, however, had been, of course, for a silent picture.