Aside from the unfamiliarity of the stage and operatic star with the medium of motion-pictures, a difficulty enhanced by the arrogance with which they usually approach the new field, there is another fundamental obstruction in the path of the film-producer who exploits them. Although their names may be on the lips of every inhabitant of a large city, many a small town knows them not. Main Street, which counts enormously in pictures, is apt to be much more familiar with some comparatively obscure film actress than with Farrar or Garden. This fact was brought home to me when, some months after signing my contract with Miss Garden, I was talking with a small-town exhibitor who had come with his lawyer to see me about signing a contract for Goldwyn films. “Ah,” remarked the lawyer, looking at some photographs on my desk, “I see you have engaged Mary Garden. That ought to be a great card.” “Mary Garden!” exclaimed the exhibitor at this point. “Why, what’s new about her. I showed her five years ago and charged five cents admission.” Evidently he had confused the prima donna with Mary Gardner, a screen actress. One of the incidents which stands out from that Winter in the Fort Lee studio was the meeting which I effected between Mary Garden and Geraldine Farrar. The two rivals had never been introduced. But neither apparently had found acquaintance necessary to the formation of a firm opinion. In the days when Miss Farrar used to be working in the Lasky studio I would sometimes talk to her while De Mille was taking other scenes. The conversation usually drifted toward people, and its current bore us almost inevitably to Mary Garden. It was quite patent, however, that the fascination which this theme seemed to possess for Geraldine was that of professional rivalry, which always exists, and the greater the prima donnas the more vehement the feeling. When I came to meet Miss Garden I found the sentiment strikingly reciprocal. Yet on that famous day when I brought Miss Farrar over to the Fort Lee studio to meet her rival I wish that the world might have shared with me the effusiveness of that greeting. Never were two women more glad to see each other. The affectionate cadences of their voices, the profound appreciation of the privilege of this moment expressed by each--these ended at last in a farewell kiss. But the kiss, I discovered later, had worked no psychological change. Both felt exactly the same after the meeting as they had before. My experience with Miss Garden was costly. It was not, however, so ill-fated as was the Goldwyn Company’s engagement of Maxine Elliott. With this episode I shall begin my next chapter and shall follow it with the story of Pauline Frederick, the Goldwyn Company’s engagement of Geraldine Farrar, and with my memories of Charlie Chaplin. _Chapter Eleven_ MAXINE ELLIOTT AND PAULINE FREDERICK