At last we were there! Mr. Hammer gallantly suggested, although it was afternoon, that the women of the company go to a hotel at the Biograph’s expense, until they located permanent quarters. So the ladies were registered at the Alexandria, then but lately opened, and shining and grand it was. Although they made but a short stay there, they attracted considerable attention. One day Mary Pickford stepped out of the Alexandria’s elevator just as William Randolph Hearst was entering. Seeing Mary, he said, “I wonder who that pretty girl is.” And one night at dinner, between sips of his ale, indicating our table which was but one removed from his, Mr. Hearst wondered some more as to who the people were. The players were quite overcome at the company’s hospitality. It was quite different from traveling with a theatrical road show where you had to pay for sleepers and meals, and where you might be dumped out at a railroad station at any hour of the cold gray dawn, with a Miners’ Convention occupying every bed and couch in the town, and be left entirely to your own resources. I may be wrong, but I think Mr. Grey of the office force (but not the Mr. Grey of the present Griffith organization; it was years before his movie affiliation, and the Biograph’s Mr. Grey has been dead some years now) went out to California ahead of the company to make banking arrangements and look around for a location for the studio. On Grand Avenue and Washington Street, hardly ten minutes by trolley from Broadway and Fifth, and seven by motor from our hotel, mixed in with a lumber yard and a baseball park, was a nice vacant lot. It was surrounded by a board fence six feet or so in height, high enough to prevent passers-by from looking in on us. Just an ordinary dirt lot, it was. In the corners and along the fence-edges the coarse-bladed grass, the kind that grows only in California, had already sprouted, and otherwise it looked just like a small boy’s happy baseball ground. It was selected for the studio. [Illustration: Joe Graybill, Blanche Sweet and Vivian Prescott, in “How She Triumphed.” (_See p. 184_) ] A stage had to be rigged up where we could take “interiors,” for while we intended doing most of our work “on location,” there would have to be a place where we could lay a carpet and place pieces of furniture about for parlor, bedroom--but not bath. As yet modesty had deterred us from entering that sanctum of tiles, porcelain, cold cream, and rose-water jars. Mr. C. B. DeMille was as yet a bit away in the offing, and Milady’s ablutions and Milord’s Gilette were still matters of a private nature--to the movies. [Illustration: Mack Sennett, Mabel Normand and Fred Mace, in a “Keystone Comedy.” (_See p. 204_) ]