We were going to Los Angeles to take moving pictures, and Hollywood
didn’t mean a thing. Pasadena the company knew about. Like Palm Beach,
it was where millionaires sojourned for two months during the Eastern
winter. San Gabriel Mission they’d seen photos of, and counted on using
it in pictures. They understood there were many beaches accessible by
trolley; and residential districts like West Adams; even Figueroa, the
home of Los Angeles’s first millionaires, was a fine avenue then; and
Westlake and Eastlake Parks which were quite in town. But they didn’t
know Edendale from the Old Soldiers’ Home at Sawtelle. San Pedro? Yes,
that was where the steamers arrived from San Francisco. San Fernando?
Well, yes, there was a Mission there too, but it was rather far away,
and right in the heart of a parched and cactus-covered desert. Mt. Lowe
was easy--there was the incline railway to help us to the top.
Four luxurious days on luxurious trains before we would sight the palms
and poinsettias that were gaily beckoning to us across the distances.
Let us away!
The company departed via the Black Diamond Express on the Lehigh
Valley, which route meant ferry to Jersey City. A late arrival in
Chicago allowed just comfortable time to make the California Limited
leaving at 8 P.M.
The company was luxurious for but three days.
It was only Mr. R. H. Hammer, my husband, and myself who had been
allotted four full days of elegance. We _de luxe’d_ out of New York via
the Twentieth Century Limited. I had come into my own.
Mr. Powell was in charge of the company and so he checked them off on
arrival at the ferry--Marion Leonard, Florence Barker, Mary Pickford,
Dorothy West, Kate Bruce, the women; George Nichols, Henry Walthall,
Billy Quirk, Frank Grandin, Charlie West, Mack Sennett, Dell Henderson,
Arthur Johnson, Daddy Butler, Christie Miller, Tony O’Sullivan, and
Alfred Paget, the men. There were three wives who were actresses also,
Eleanor Hicks, Florence Lee (Mrs. Dell Henderson), and Mrs. George
Nichols. And there were two camera men, Billy Bitzer and Arthur Marvin;
a scenic artist, Eddie Shelter; a carpenter or two, and two property
boys, Bobbie Harron and Johnny Mahr.
No theatrical job had come along for Mary Pickford, and the few summer
months she had intended spending in “the pictures” would lengthen into
a full year now that she had decided to go with us to California. Her
salary was still small: it was about forty dollars a week at this time.
Frank Powell had a busy hour at the Ferry Building although Mr.
Griffith was there also to see that all the company got on board. He
had not anticipated too smooth an exit. Nor did he get it, even though
he had taken well into account his temperamentalists. And sure enough,
Arthur Johnson and Charlie West arrived breathless and hatless, fresh
from an all-night party, just as the last gong rang.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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