Life and Lillian Gish

“SUPPORTING BERNHARDT”

There is some difficulty as to the sequence of Lillian’s story. As we have seen, she did not go out with her mother and Dorothy that second season of “Her First False Step.” She had a part in another play—“The Child Wife,” or “At Duty’s Call,” it is not quite certain which came first. The little trouper did not know that she was making history—did not consider a time when it all might need to be arranged. She did not keep a scrapbook, and had no one to keep it for her. She probably did not think of a diary, and in any case would have been too tired to set down what, to her, was the humdrum routine of trains and towns and waits and scanty meals. Later, it was all a good deal of a blur. A few things stood out, because they were unusual, but even these did not always fall into their proper setting, as to time. There are spaces not easy to bridge, pieces difficult to fit into the picture-puzzle of the years. She remembers the tragedy of finding at the beginning of one season that she could no longer squeeze herself through the iron divisions of the station seats. She remembers that for a time she took lessons in dancing—stage dancing. Both she and her mother had realized the value of this: one able to dance could often get a better part. Sarah Bernhardt came to New York that winter, and seeking a child dancer to brighten some scene in one of her plays, went to a dancing teacher, and from his class selected Lillian.

Bernhardt was over sixty at this time, but was still the “divine Sarah, with the voice of gold.” Her engagement at the Lyric Theatre began with a very grand opening, December 15, 1905. Plenty of attractions along Broadway, just then. At Wallack’s, William Faversham, in “The Squaw Man”; David Warfield at the Bijou, in “The Music Master”; Maude Adams at the Empire, in “Peter Pan.” The little Gish girl had distinguished company in all directions for her first Broadway appearance. Perhaps that was a good omen.

Lillian’s recollection of that engagement is chiefly a mental picture of a tall and beautiful woman—Sarah—who each night in the wings, as they waited to go on, laid her hand on her head and said, tenderly, something in French—“Le petit ange aux beaux cheveux d’or,” if one may hazard a guess. Then, with another little girl, she danced. She was deeply impressed by the fact that the stage was covered with canvas, for the actors to walk on. The stages she had known were not like that—oh, not at all. And did somebody appear and carry her off, quite suddenly—kidnap her? She has that impression, but cannot be certain.

Long afterwards, when she herself had become famous, Madame Bernhardt sent her affectionate messages.

Lillian’s memory was never very good as to events and surroundings. She memorized her parts easily enough, and her lessons, because she worked very hard at any task. At the beginning of each season came a period of rehearsing—with many new “sides” (pages) to be learned, if the play was a new one. Absorbing things, these. Other matters—the daily round, the people she met, the details of an environment—interfered little with the cadences of her thoughts, left but a drifting impression on that fairy mind of hers. While still a child, she had seen too much, and too many—of everything. And it had all been just a pursuit of sleep and desirable food, and a longing for the shelter of a mother’s arms. That last, especially—when one was not well … nights … days, too … oh, yes, and the ache of homesickness … is it any wonder that more and more her face took on that wistful look that one day would be regarded almost as its chief charm?

There were happier things—even another Christmas Tree, quite a big one! In Detroit, the stage entrance of the theatre where “At Duty’s Call” was playing, opened on an alley, and just across was a store where automobile parts were sold. The men who owned it went to the play, and took enough interest in the “child star” to go to the manager and offer to have a tree for her, in their back room. All the company was invited, and came. Such a beautiful tree, with so many nice things on it! A grateful little girl was quite overcome; especially by a handsome sled which the company had bought for her. Everybody said that it must go with her, on the road. And they saw to it that it did. Always, after that, when there was snow—even if only just a little snow—they pulled her to the station on it, after the performance.

XII

MASSILLON DAYS

Seasons changed … the years went on. From the train window, Lillian saw the snow come, then go, leaving only lines along the hedgerows, or white tracks across the watery meadows to show which way winter had passed. Then flowers, bits of blue and white and yellow … after that, summer, and New York, or maybe Massillon.

Lillian realized that she was growing tall … too tall, almost, for the parts she was playing. She supposed that presently she would have to give up the stage, and go to school regularly, or at least until she was old enough for the more grown-up parts. Perhaps that would be in New York … more likely in Massillon. She hoped it would be Massillon. She liked it there, at Aunt Emily’s place, which they called “the farm,” (though it was not really that,) especially when Dorothy was there, too. They helped Aunt Emily with her housekeeping, and when that was done, they could run in the fields, not far away. Buster, the dog, ran with them, and insisted on following Dorothy, like Mary’s lamb, to a little school she went to, and nearly broke up the classes. The teacher was like Mary’s, too. She turned Buster out, and when he “lingered near,” threatened to do terrible things to him.

There was an old bicycle at Massillon, a rusty old thing without tires, but it would go. It was too big, of course, but Lillian had got it out of the woodshed and lowered the seat, and had been able to get on it, and fall, and get on and fall again, and by and by to get on and stay there. She had really learned to ride it—that was something.

Almost anything was likely to happen at “the farm”—mostly pleasant things, but not always. There was an insane asylum in Massillon, and when one of the inmates escaped, which happened every little while, the asylum whistle blew, and timid people locked their doors. Aunt Emily at such times sent her nieces to the attic, or cellar. They did not like those places, and were not afraid, anyhow. They were more afraid of a cow that had chased them from a back field.

Lillian reflected that once she had been really quite wicked: A black thundercloud was rising in the west, just as she was starting to see her friend, Marion Benedict, down the street. Lillian never minded lightning, but her aunt was terribly afraid of it and begged her not to go and leave her.

“But I told Marion I would come!”

“But you can go later—afterwards.”

“But I want to go now.”

“Oh, dear, I believe you love Marion Benedict better than you do me.”

“Yes, I do.”

How awful to have said such a thing to dear Aunt Emily, who was so shocked that never in the world would she forget it! Perhaps it had been the lightning in the air.

Once, a cousin had come to see them—a second cousin, named Leonard Hall, about her own age. Their mother was there, and had dressed them up for the occasion—white dresses, their hair loose, with big pink bows; they had been almost as nice as dolls. She had thought her boy cousin quite nice, too, for a boy—and boy cousins were so scarce. She had hoped he would play with them … but he would hardly even look at them—edged away, and then ran, almost as if something were after him … and didn’t come back any more. She wondered why. They had on all their prettiest things, and Dorothy at least had been a perfect picture.

Lillian reflected on these matters as she rode along, or looked from a hotel window. If she went to Massillon this summer, would she see her cousin again? And Buster, and Marion Benedict? Would she stay there, now, and go to school, or go back to the road for another season? She thought dreamily of these and other things. She did not trouble much, about the future, or the past—then, or later. She followed a kind of magic path, that opened before, and closed behind her as she passed along.

There came a season when the theatrical business was poor. The road companies, especially, suffered. Their profits became more than ever precarious. Motion picture shows were cutting into their business. One-night-stand theatres were being converted into “picture palaces,” and “nickelodeons,” that offered pretty good entertainment at ridiculously low prices, and had very light “overhead.” The combinations, the smaller ones, with their salaries and railroad fares, could not compete. Lillian went out with quite a pretentious company, and a play which was “sure to get to New York and make a hit on Broadway.” It did not get much further than Washington, where it opened. At Baltimore, or Richmond, it came to grief. The company had trouble getting home. At a later time, Lillian wrote: “When we were ambitious and went into better productions, the plays seemed to fail.” But this was due rather to the new conditions in the amusement world, than because of the plays themselves. The “movies” had filed a claim on the melodrama. One could scorn them, as many did in the beginning, but the handwriting was on the wall.

Mary Gish wondered what was best to do next. She had saved some money, but with nothing coming in, how quickly it would go.

For one thing, she must have a new dress. The children said so, quite insistently, and she knew they were right.

“We begged her to buy a new one. Finally, one day, she bought some Alice-blue material and made herself a gown. She always made all the clothes, herself. Then we begged her to get a new hat. So she went to the five-and-ten-cent store, and bought a frame for a little toque, and covered it with little five-and-ten roses. She looked so pretty in her new things—and we were all so happy. We thought everything so beautiful. She was not to wear them until Easter.

“We lived in furnished rooms over by Eighth Avenue, away up I don’t know how many flights, next the roof. Mother put her dress on a hanger, and hung it in a closet, with the hat over it. We all gathered to admire it. It was such an event for mother to have a new dress.

“That night there came up a terrible rain, and the roof over the closet leaked. The water came through in streams, and ran down over mother’s new hat, and the color came out of the lovely five-and-ten roses and dripped all over the new Alice-blue dress. It was ruined. We all cried over it; it was a real tragedy.”

XIII

WHERE THE “ROAD” ENDS. NELL

News came to Mrs. Gish that a brother in St. Louis had died, leaving a widow. She took the children to Massillon, went to St. Louis, and with her sister-in-law, opened a confectionery and ice-cream parlor, in East St. Louis, a rather drab railroad town across the river.

The business started off very well. Railroad men were good wage-earners, and East St. Louis was full of them. In a way, it was what Mary Gish had been looking forward to: her children would no longer be wanderers; they would go to school.

Lillian and Dorothy, in Massillon, probably did not suspect that their day as child actors was definitely over. Nor that they were among the last of their race. Their little world had come to an end—“A curious, romantic, gypsy world,” Lillian called it later, “and rather beautiful, I think.”

But this was long after. They did not think of it as beautiful, then, and would have concealed their connection with it, if they could. The children in the Massillon school shouted “Play-actor! Play-actor!” at Dorothy, and “Do what you used to do on the stage!” They did not harry Lillian in this way: she was older, and taller, and there was something about her face … they stood in awe of her. Someone named her the “chameleon girl,” because she seemed to change the “coloring of her personality (her mood) in the flash of an eye.”

Lillian does not remember where she first met “Nell”—Nellie Becker, a sweet-faced, happy-hearted girl, somewhat older than herself. Lillian was tall for her years, and serious-minded—the difference did not count. What did count was their instant attraction to each other. Beginning in what school-girls know as a “crush,” it presently ripened into something less fleeting, something that was to stand the wear of years. Each was the other’s ideal—the companion of which she had dreamed. They shared their hearts’ secrets, read books together. A fine young fellow, named Tom, was going to marry Nell one of these days; a boy called “Alb,” for short—a very proper boy, particular about his umbrella and overshoes—appears to have been wishfully interested in Lillian, who, being of a sober turn and not yet thirteen, was not too violently disturbed by his attentions. Whatever romantic love she had, she gave to Nell. When, at the end of the summer, she joined her mother in East St. Louis, she wrote frequent letters, though letter-writing was always her bane.

Not many girls of her age would have set out on a long railroad trip, with changes, but rail travel had few terrors for the child actress, who for six or seven years had known little else. She stopped over in Dayton, to see her Grandfather, and her first letter, with its very plain, school-girl writing, some uncertainty as to spelling, and a large indifference to punctuation, is dated from there: September 12, 1909:

Well dear I am away from Massillon once again, but feel as if I had left something behind this time that I never left before.

I arrived here at 4:05 yesterday afternoon and have been on one continual trot ever since then, and I leave here tonight at 11:25, and when I wake up I’ll be in St. Louis, as this is an awfully fast train....

[An all-night ride in a day coach, but what was that to her?]

Poor Dorothy what did she do when I left? I could hardly keep the tears back, and I couldn’t say a word for the lump in my throat.... I do hope she won’t be homesick. You know that feeling....

“You know that feeling”—who knew it better than herself? The letter ends, “Your loving make-believe sister.” It bears her East St. Louis address: 246 Collinsville Ave.

A week later she wrote, “How is my little fat sister? Does she seem to be satisfied? Bless her old fat heart, she is bad but I love her.”

She tells of a day’s trip to a small town in Illinois, and how, when she got back to the store, they were “awfully rushed, so of course I had to help.” In another letter, we hear of a girl named Mertice, who is going to give a party for her, “at a big Hall.”

They have ordered an automobile, seven passenger—45 horsepower, but it won’t be here until March. Oh, I wish you would hear her talk about all the trips we are going to take. She knows all about you, Nell. She couldn’t help but know if she is around me very long.

XIV

A CONVENT SCHOOL. TYPHOID

Lillian never got to ride in Mert’s 45 horsepower car. Almost immediately she found herself shut safely in a convent school across the river—The Ursuline Academy—not for anything she had done, or was likely to do, but because this plan seemed to offer special advantages. Her mother lived in a tiny room, near the store. It was in no sense a home, and working as she did, twelve or fourteen hours a day, she could give a daughter very little care. A public school would mean that Lillian’s free hours would have to be spent in the store, on the street, or with her aunt across the river. No place for play, no place for study. The Ursuline Academy provided board and tuition for twenty dollars a month, and was thought to be very good.

Lillian was not at first greatly interested in the convent idea, especially when she learned she could leave it but once a month. It was just another kind of those dreaded “Institutions.”

She changed her mind about all that, later. It seemed to her that at last she had reached a place of peace and rest. No troubles, no dangers, any more. She was a natural religieuse, and found a vast and nameless comfort behind the high walls and closed windows. The place might have been in the midst of the Sahara, for all that could be seen of the outer world.

The convent régime was not especially severe. Only the early rising was hard. They rose at 5:30, and had breakfast by candlelight—mild coffee and thick slices of bread. At ten came a between-luncheon, bread and jam; a hearty luncheon at noon, with bread and jam again at four; then supper, so they really ate five times a day. There was plenty of work: lessons, piano practice, French … but one could walk in the little garden, and there was a tennis court, and trees. And something more: to Nell she wrote: