Read Online American Lightning by Howard Blum - Free Book Online Page B

something intimate and presumptuous in his touch. He was “a pompous and insufferable creature” and she “wanted more than ever to escape.”
    But Mary was led to the top-floor ballroom studio, presented with a guitar, and D.W. instructed her to pretend to play it. Without further preliminaries, the camera started rolling. Owen Moore, the troupe’s rakish leading man, walked onto the set. He took one long look at Mary and in his lilting, musical voice wondered, “Who’s the dame?”
    Mary was shocked. She was not accustomed to being referred to in such a vulgar manner, and she began to admonish Moore.
    D.W. cut her off. “Never, do you hear, never stop in the middle of a scene. Do you know how much film costs per foot? You ruined it! Start from the beginning!”
    Mary bristled at the reprimand, but she began again from the top. When she finished, she was convinced she had brought nothing to the scene. She returned to the basement dressing room and changed into her blue and white dress, certain she would never again enter the Biograph Studio. But D.W. was waiting for her.
    “Will you dine with me?” the director asked.
    He was old enough to be her father! Besides, Mary had never been out on a date. She curtly refused.
    D.W. was not put off. He told her to come back tomorrow, and he offered the studio’s standard fee, five dollars a day.
    “I’m a Belasco actress, Mr. Griffith, and I must have ten.”
    D.W. laughed. “Agreed! Five dollars for today and ten for tomorrow. But keep it to yourself. No one is paid that much, and there will be a riot if it leaks out.” And he insisted on walking her to the subway, doing his best to hold his umbrella over her golden curls as a late-afternoon spring rainstorm pelted New York.
    From their first encounter, D.W., in his direct, instinctive way, had been attracted to Mary as a woman, and as a screen actress. And Mary, shrewd and pragmatic, had been willing to learn from D.W., and manipulate him.

    The next day Mary began her film career, playing the pretty daughter in
The Violin Maker of Cremona.
It screened later that week in the brownstone’s second-floor bedroom, which had been converted into a projection room. The reaction, according to D.W.’s wife, was unanimous: “The studio bunch was all agog over the picture and the new girl.”
    Mary quickly became D.W.’s favorite, and he used her often. The camera would focus on Mary, and her desires, instincts, impulses, and thoughts seemed bared on the screen for the audience to see. Her versatility was also unique. She could be cast in roles beyond her years, in comedies or melodramas, as a scrubwoman or a society woman, an Indian squaw or a choir girl.
    Movies were new to Mary, but they were also new to D.W. With discipline, spontaneity, and a good deal of squabbling, they worked together to expand the medium’s artistic possibilities. They were pioneers, and they fed off each other’s instincts and experimentations.
    Mary, for example, thought the elaborate screen gestures used by the other actors were too exaggerated, more like pantomimes. She conducted herself on screen with a stage actress’s subtlety and control. At first D.W. threatened to fire her unless she gave more histrionic performances. But after he watched her on the screen, he came around to embracing her realistic acting style. It was, he realized, more suitable for the stories he wanted to tell. It made them more believable.
    Yet D.W., too, had his own expectations for a performance. While filming the climax of
To Save Her Soul,
when the villain waves a revolver at Mary, D.W. became annoyed. Mary was not showing sufficient fear.
    He rushed onto the set, grabbed Mary by the shoulders, and shook her violently. “I’ll show you how to do this thing!” he shouted. “Get some feeling into you, damn it! You’re like a piece of wood.”
    Without thinking, Mary bit him on the hand. “What gave you the right to lay your hands on me?” she shouted. Then