Her second picture was “The Lonely Villa,” the brain child of Mack
Sennett, gleaned from a newspaper--good old-fashioned melodrama. Mary
played a child of twelve with two younger sisters and a mother. They
were nice people, and wealthy. Miss Leonard, playing the mother, would
be beautifully arrayed in the brown-silk-and-velvet. But what could be
done for Mary? She had no clothes fit for the wealthy little aristocrat
she was to portray and there was nothing in the meager stock wardrobe
for her. “Oh, she’s so pretty,” I said to my husband, “can’t we dress
her up? She’ll just be darling in the right kind of clothes.” So he
parted with twenty dollars from the cash register and trusted me to
dispose of it at Best’s--then on Twenty-third Street--for a proper
wardrobe. Off I went on my joyful errand, and brought back to the
studio a smart pale blue linen frock, blue silk stockings to match, and
nifty patent leather pumps. What a dainty little miss she looked, her
fluffy curls a-bobbing, when she had donned the new pretties!
During the dreary waits between scenes, there being no private
dressing-rooms, actors would be falling all over each other, and they
could find seclusion only by digging themselves in behind old and
unused scenery. Owen Moore was especially apt in hiding himself. He had
an unfriendly way of disappearing. None of the herd instinct in him.
At times we had quite a job locating him. Cruising along the back drop
of a Coney Island Police Court, or perhaps a section of the Chinese
wall, we’d innocently stumble upon him. But we didn’t need to hunt
him the day that Mary Pickford was all dressed up in Best & Company’s
best. That day he never left the camera stand, and his face was all one
generous Irish smile. (How little we know when our troubles are going
to begin!)
Following “The Lonely Villa” came “The Way of Man” and then a series of
comedies in which Mary was teamed with Billy Quirk, “Sweet and Twenty,”
“They Would Elope,” “His Wife’s Visitors.”
Though Mary Pickford affiliated with the movies for twenty-five dollars
weekly with the understanding that she would work three days a week and
play “parts” only, she was a good sport and would come in as an “extra”
in a scene if we needed her. So occasionally in a courtroom scene, or
a church wedding where the camera was set up to get the congregation
or spectators from the rear, Mary could attend with perfect safety as
the Pickford curls, from the back of her head, would never have been
recognized by the most enthusiastic fan of that day. Mr. Griffith would
not have his “Mary” a “super.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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