And Grandmama told Mrs. O’Shaugnessy our name was Bridgewood. I remember the old lady made a face and asked what kind of name was that.
Grandmama responded, “It’s no kind of name.”
She didn’t know I was hiding under the back porch. I’d gone there to escape my brother, who resented my presence and was constantly tormenting me. I hated him. I despised everything about Buffalo, in fact—especially Grandmama, who could make Mother cry with her hard words. Grandmama had held a grudge against Mother for years. Mother had married an Englishman, hadn’t she? And all the Irish hated the English. And Mother was an actress, living a sinful, heathen life. When she had gotten married, Mother had tried to give up the stage, but Grandmama didn’t see it that way. Hadn’t she met her husband while she’d been performing? Hadn’t he been one of those men who came to watch her dance? Hadn’t he come every night to see her? He was an old man, some thirty years her senior—as old as her own father. Grandmama had called Bridgewood the devil himself.
It’s no kind of name.
So I didn’t mind very much when I gave it up and became Florence Lawrence. Not at first. Later, I came to mind very much. But then I was happy to shed anything that reminded me of that bitter-faced old man who lived over his cabinet shop in Hamilton. I barely knew my father. Occasionally, on Sundays, before we left Canada, my mother would take me to his shop, where he always sat, frowning and hunched over a piece of wood, carving it with his knife. I’d just stand there, mute and unmoving, watching him. His shop smelled of sawdust and pine, of stains and paint. I remember my footsteps in the wood dust on the floor.
I never asked why we didn’t live with him. It just seemed natural that we didn’t. It was Ducks, after all, who took me to the market on his shoulders. It was Ducks who the other children assumed to be my father. But I knew he wasn’t. I always understood the truth. My father was a frightening old man who never smiled, who rarely spoke to me. He had flaking, wrinkled skin, white hair and horrible, horrible hands—scarred and spotted, with his left ring finger cut off at the knuckle. I would stand there in his shop and look up at him, never speaking, as he whittled away with his knife. A plain-faced woman always lurked somewhere in the background, making his food—my half sister, as I’d learn later, from my father’s first marriage, to a “respectable” woman—but she rarely spoke either. She just looked at me as if I were some urchin wandered in from the street.
A few years after we left, my father killed himself. Oh, that’s not what the papers said. That’s not what Mother told me. But he did. Shut all his windows and lay in front of his coal stove. He was seventy-two years old. My brother found him there five days later. Cold and hard. I hated to think about it. As a girl I’d put my hands to my ears and scrunch up my face whenever Norman tried to taunt me with the fact. My father killed himself. Grandmother said suicides burned the longest in hell.
Even longer than murderers.
My mother was a proud woman. Lawrence was her idea, her creation, pulled out of the air. I can see her now, her great eyes widening, her gray hair swept up, her high lace collar too tight on her throat.
“You will not defame the name of Lawrence by appearing in the flickers,” she’s warning, adamantly opposed to the idea of earning some extra money by working in moving pictures. But her fears were groundless: In those chaotic early years, no one was billed in the movies. Sometimes there wasn’t even a title—just scenes running together up on the screen in those dusty, cramped nickelodeons.
We were living in New York, in a tiny two-room flat with a shared bath on the third floor of a brownstone tenement on West Fiftieth Street. We paid eighteen dollars a month. Ducks and his current companion, a young man named Jimmie, lived one floor up.
Jimmie had been a dancer, but was too plump to have much of a career. He was more pretty than handsome, with absurdly long eyelashes and big red pouty lips. Ducks enjoyed spoiling him, as he did all his beaus. He’d spend all his hard-earned cash on sweetmeats and candied apples for Jimmie, and when Jimmie complained that Ducks’s snoring kept him awake at night, poor old Ducks would hobble downstairs and sleep on our floor.
How I remember Mother in that little place, boiling water on the stove, dropping in eggs she’d bought on the street and carried up in her apron. On Christmas Eve that year, we bought a small evergreen tree from a vendor on the street. Ducks dragged it up the three flights of stairs, its needles scattering everywhere. We popped corn over the fire and Jimmie strung it along a silk thread Mother had found in her sewing box. That was the extent of the tree’s decoration. But it smelled so lovely—bringing a little bit of the forest into the city, a sharp sting of pine.
Times were hard. Work was very difficult to come by. But we knew if we were to make it on the stage, we had to be in New York. Broadway was in its thrilling infancy then. The Belasco was the first, but the west forties were filled with theaters, their great white lights turning night into day. That season I remember Blanche Ring and Vernon Castle in About Town and Lew Fields’s and May Irwin’s names up in electric bulbs on the marquees.
Linda and I wrote constantly back and forth. I told her all about the lights of Broadway, about saving my money so I could see Clara Palmer in The Blue Moon. I couldn’t wait for Linda to be here with me. That Christmas she sent me a pair of mittens. “It must already be snowing there,” she wrote. “I’ve never seen snow.”
It did indeed snow a great deal that winter. When I think back it’s always snowing that first season in New York. Cold, wet, blowing snow. I wore the mittens conspicuously. “They’re from Linda,” I told Ducks.
“Honestly,” Mother sniffed. “You act as if she were a beau.”
We were heading out to another casting call. Mother had turned her entire ambition to me, determined that, if we couldn’t be the most famous mother and daughter in the theater, I’d still be the most famous actress on my own. She accompanied me on every audition, traipsing up Broadway and down to the Village, sharing my disappointment each time another girl was chosen. How old was I? Fifteen? Sixteen? Somewhere around there. I was taller than Mother, but hardly. Neither of us stood much more than five feet. I was pretty, if I do say so myself. Blond, as Mother had been before her hair went gray. Trim, small waist, round breasts.
“You’re as pretty as any of them up there with their names in lights,” Mother said every day. It was her grit and drive that pushed me; she had more energy than girls half her age.
Which served her well. New York was a hard, fast place. The sidewalks and streets were always burdened with people, pushing and elbowing their way past anyone who dared to dawdle. Laborers carrying vegetable and fruit crates from long, rattling wagons. Hawkers with their stinking wooden pallets of fish covered with ice. Street urchins and dirty-faced little pickpockets crouched over steam vents on cold nights. Turn a corner and you’d suddenly be accosted by an onrushing pack of olive-skinned young men—Italians or Greeks or Jews—chattering away in their incomprehensible tongues. We’d turn another corner only to be assaulted by a squawking gaggle of hens, feathers flying, as some vendor shooed them along in front of him.
And then there were the cars. Suddenly the streets were filled with them, their shiny metal glinting in the sun, their horns bleating like sheep, their proud drivers lording over the slowpoke horses and wagons that continued to trudge by, as if from another time. They’d come careening down Broadway and screeching around the square, scaring the horses and prompting bets to be laid down in saloons on which pedestrian or horse cart would be run over next.
Through it all, every day, went Mother. Of course, I’d accompany her, but it was Mother who led the way, Mother who had the nerve to dodge the automobiles and push through the chickens and the crowds. She’d pick up the Dramatic Mirror and pull out her map. “Today we head over to Broadway,” she’d say or, “Down to the Village we go.” We’d trudge into the marble lobby and ride the squeaking iron elevator cage up to the producer’s office. Somehow Mother always managed to weasel m
e up to the front of the line or else bang on a frosted-glass door she’d been forbidden to enter. “Here’s your girl,” she’d say to the fat men in shirtsleeves and vests, cigars clenched arrogantly between their lips. She’d take my hand and urge me up in front of them. “Have a good look at your next star, gentlemen, for here she is.”
They usually called me very pretty. But despite Mother’s best efforts, I landed no work on the stage. She began taking in laundry in our small apartment and sold off her jewelry and pearl-studded cane to buy food and pay the rent. Ducks did what he could to help, but he was now supporting Jimmie, whose demands were not only increasingly extravagant but also more frequent.
I didn’t love New York the way I had loved San Francisco. There were too many people, and the buildings were far too close together. There were no views, no panoramas of land, sea, and sky as there were in my fabled Golden City. The gutters were filled with mud and horse piss, and the early morning stench that rose to our windows was often unbearable.
Still, there was an excitement I couldn’t deny. New York had a brash charm unique in itself, a color and character all its own. On the corners, boys in knickers hawked newspapers. Some were wide-eyed and friendly; others chewed tobacco and spat it rudely on the street when you passed. Girls, many younger than I, with painted mouths and cheeks sold hot roasted ears of corn down by the piers. Organ grinders cranked out tinkly little tunes while their spider monkeys danced on their leashes, dropping little turds all in a row. Vendors with horse-drawn wagons sold flavored gum drops and sugar-roasted peanuts for a nickel a bag. Sometimes, without any of us making an issue of it, such goodies stood in for dinner.
I remember the first time I walked across the bridge that connects the island of Manhattan with Brooklyn. I’d seen it all lit up at night like an electric carnival, and I marveled at the great ships that passed beneath it. Its sheer size seemed unreal, like some strange optical illusion, so Ducks and I decided to go the distance and walk its span of sixteen hundred feet. We looked down at the steamboats and up at the rattling trains that passed overhead. We felt terribly small. The giant skeleton of iron and steel trembled under our feet. Behind us the city of millions was slowly popping into electric life against the gray-and-purple twilight.
If only Linda were here to see. I held her latest letter in my coat pocket. In it, she told me she had gotten married. Her new husband was a playwright. They were coming to New York to sell his play to Mr. Belasco.
That thought sustained me. Linda would be in New York soon. Every day I waited for the telegram announcing her arrival in the city.
Oh, it was all romantic tomfoolery—I knew that even then, but there aren’t many things in life more potent than that. Even for a girl as cynical as I’d already become, the fragrance of fresh oranges could still transport me across time and space.
“Well,” Mother sniffed, “maybe her husband can at least get you some work with Belasco.”
“Maybe he can get all of us work,” I suggested.
“Well, in the meantime,” Ducks said, pouring us all some beer, “I’ve taken a job at Vitagraph out in Flatbush for a few days. They needed someone who could ride a horse.”
“Oh, Ducks,” Mother said, frowning. “The flickers?”
“Five dollars a day, Lotta.”
“Oh, Mother, I can ride a horse.” I looked at her wide-eyed and willing. I thought of the Vitascope, how thrilling it had been to watch pictures dance on the screen. “What do you say, Mother?”
I remember the wind whistling outside our window. A five-cent baker’s pie was warming in the oven, the smell of cinnamon and apples filling the room. Mother had traded her services for the pie; the baker’s freshly laundered socks and undershirts were strung across our kitchen. Outside in the snow on the window ledge a bottle of beer chilled for dinner. That and egg soup were our holiday meal.
It was Christmas Day.
I’ve never been good with dates, but I know that my first day in front of a moving picture camera was December 28, 1906, and at the end of the day, I found a dead man.
Cold and blue. Almost black. Hanging from a tree in Bronx Park. No one knew how long he’d been hanging there. I watched the men cut him down. We never learned who he was or why he’d taken his own life.
December 28. I used to mark the anniversary every year on my calendar. Sometimes we’d all have a toast—in those years when there were still people to toast with—Mother or Harry or Pop Lubin or Charles and I. The last time I raised a glass to the memory of that date was the night before I walked away from all of it. Lester had brought over a bottle of champagne, a sweet gesture, the kind of thing Lester was always doing. Bob was there, and Marian.
And Molly, too, of course. Standing right there next to me with the platinum growing out of her hair in streaks.
“Here’s to a new life in pictures!” Lester exclaimed. The cork popped, hitting the ceiling. “Here’s to the return of The Biograph Girl!”
The movies. I had no idea that cold and bitter morning when we set out for the Edison studios in the Bronx how much they’d shape my life. All of our lives. To appear in one seemed demeaning to Mother, who still carried with her delusions of grandeur on the stage. But when I first saw myself up there on the screen, twenty feet tall, what I saw was so startling, so astounding, that I couldn’t look at anyone else in the picture.
I wore the mittens Linda had sent and wrapped my scarf completely around my head, leaving just little slits for my eyes. It wouldn’t do for my face to be all purple from cold when we got there.
“There’s not enough sun,” Mother kept griping. She was only reluctantly going anyway. “They’ll never be able to photograph us.”
Back then, you see, moving pictures could only be shot when there was sunlight. Arc lamps were still some years in the future. But the Edison crew was game. They assured us they’d get in as much footage as they could whenever the sun peeked out from the clouds.
“Over here, Miss Lawrence,” the assistant director, Mr. McCutcheon, called. “Here’s your noble steed.”
The horse whinnied at me. He was agitated, lifting his front legs and shaking his head. “Can you calm him?” the assistant director asked.
I looked into the animal’s eyes. They were black and wild. “I’ll do what I can,” I promised.
Mother was introducing herself to the other players, acting like some grande dame of the theater. They were from Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show. The picture was called Daniel Boone, or Pioneer Days in America. I was to play one of the Boone girls; Mother had been assigned the part of Mrs. Boone.
I mounted the horse. I pressed my legs firmly around him the way a man would, stroking his neck, whispering soothing words into his high, active ears. He was a fine horse, with a strong back and good withers. He was just excited—maybe from being penned up too long, maybe from the bitter cold, maybe from the snapping bonfire where we warmed our hands and faces between scenes.
The director was Mr. Edwin Porter, who was quite famous, I learned—the director of The Great Train Robbery, the biggest hit of all time. He was perched on a small incline and shouted his direction through a megaphone. The camera—a big, heavy clumsy box mounted on a large tripod—stood off to his left.
“All right, Miss Lawrence,” Mr. Porter boomed at me. “Now it’s your turn. Ride in toward the camera, but for heaven’s sake, don’t knock it over.”
I gave the horse a kick. He whinnied and began to buck. I attempted to steady him, knowing that if I failed to do so I might never be hired by Mr. Porter again. I’d told him I was an expert rider. And I was. I had learned when I was just a girl, and I had ridden through all those frontier towns we played out west. I couldn’t understand why this horse wasn’t cooperating. I’d always been able to soothe a horse before. He raised his front legs, snorting furiously. “Come on, boy,” I said, reaching around to stroke the side of his face. “Come on.”
He lurched. I gave a kick again, but he reared up, spat, and bounded
off in the wrong direction, away from the scene. The camera would get only a look at the horse’s ass—and me bouncing off its back like some pampered city girl.
“Whoa, boy!” I called. “Whoa!”
I heard Mr. Porter cry out after us. I pulled on the reins, bringing the animal to a halt. “Please, boy,” I said. “Come on, boy. Let’s go.”
I felt the animal tremble. Poor thing. He was terrified. But of what?
Why do you want to be an actress, Flo?
Linda’s voice.
Is it just the applause?
Why was I thinking of Linda all of a sudden? What was I doing on top of this terrified horse?
It was cold and a light snowy mist had begun to fall. I just sat there still on the horse, continuing to whisper reassurances into his ear. “It’ll be all right, boy,” I promised him. “We’ll do our bit and then we’ll go home.”
Finally I was able to turn him around. We trotted back toward the camera. “Have him under control now, girl?” Mr. Porter called.
“I think so,” I said, but in truth I had no idea.
“All right, then. We’ll give you another shot.”
This time the horse did as I bid him. We galloped toward the camera, clearing it by about a foot. Mr. Porter called, “Perfect!”
The Biograph Girl Page 15
