Occasionally, Frank Craven, since famous as the author of many successful Broadway plays, came down and watched pictures being made. While he personally didn’t care about the movies, through him Jack Standing came down and jobbed at twenty per. Through friendship for Mr. and Mrs. Frank Powell, with whom he had acted in Ellen Terry’s company, David Powell entered the fold for twenty per. Even though money tempted, the high-class actor came more readily through friendship for some one already “in” than as a cold business proposition. Our movie money was talking just the same. But hard as it was to get men, it was much harder to get women. They would not leave that “drammer” (how they loved it!) to work in a dingy studio with no footlights, no admiring audience to applaud them, and no pretty make-ups. Only occasionally did I accompany my husband on a tour of the dramatic agencies, for our manner to each other was still a most unmarried one. I’d wait in the taxi while he went up to the different offices to see if he could entice some fair feminine. But, after each visit, back he’d plump into the taxi so distressed, “I can get men, but I cannot get women; they simply won’t come.” Well, if he couldn’t lure ladies from the agencies, he’d grab them off the street. With Austin Webb, an actor friend who has since left the stage for promotion of oil and skyscrapers, he was strolling along Broadway one day when a little black-haired girl passed by accompanied by her mother. “Now that’s the kind of girl I’m looking for,” said Mr. Griffith. Mr. Webb answered: “Well, why not speak to her? She’s an actress, you can bet your hat on that.” But the movie director having a certain position to maintain, and not wanting to be misunderstood, hesitated. Mr. Webb volunteered, stepped up to and asked the girl would she like to work in a moving picture. Prompt her reply, “Oh, I’d love to, I just love pictures.” The “girl” was Marion Sunshine of the then vaudeville team of Sunshine and Tempest. She was quite a famous personality to be in Biograph movies at this time. Now Austin Webb, who during David Griffith’s movie acting days had loaned him his own grand wardrobe, was one who might have become a big movie star. David implored him to try it, but he was skeptical. It took sporting blood to plunge moviewards in the crude days of our beginnings. Who could tell which way the thing would flop? CHAPTER XVI CUDDEBACKVILLE I was not one of the select few who made the first trip to Cuddebackville, New York. I had been slated for a visit to my husband’s folks in Louisville, Kentucky, and while there this alluring adventure was slipped over on me. A new picture was being started out at Greenwich, Connecticut, at Commodore Benedict’s, the day I was leaving, and as I was taking a late train, I was invited out on a farewell visit, as it were.