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.”
“Armor, in this heat? Armor? I guess I won’t wear armor.” Then a short
pause, “Are you going to wear armor?”
“Yes, I’m no teacher’s pet,” said Dell, as he gathered to himself
the pieces of his suit of mail and began to climb into them. So the
doubting Mack Sennett could do naught but imitate him, for no matter
how balky his manner, one word from the boss and he became a good
little boy again.
In August we were once more back in Cuddebackville. The O. and W.’s
conductor was no longer skeptical of our visits. We brought so many
actors sometimes that we not only filled the little Inn but had to find
neighboring farmhouses in which to park the overflow.
We met all the old Cuddebacks again. We never realized what a tribe
they were until we had to do a scene in a cemetery, and every grave we
picked made trouble for us with some Cuddeback or other still living.
How to get away with it we didn’t know until we hit upon the idea of
simultaneously enacting a fake but intensely melodramatic scene down by
the General Store. That did the trick. All the villagers missed their
lunch that day and were unaware of the desecration of their dead.
“Wally” Walthall gave his famous fried chicken luncheon at the
minister’s house. Talent was versatile. We’d worked through our lunch
hour this day, so it was either go lunchless or beg the privilege of
slaughtering some of the minister’s wife’s tempting spring chickens and
cooking them in her kitchen. That’s how “Wally” had the opportunity to
prove his fried chicken the equal of any Ritz-Carlton’s.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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