Bringing Up Oscar: The Story of the Men and Women Who Founded the Academy

by Debra Ann Pawlak

  Flagstaff no good for our purposes. Have proceeded to California. Want authority to rent barn in place called Hollywood for $75 a month. Regards to Sam. Cecil

  His words sent Lasky and Goldfish into an uproar. They thought their movie was being filmed in Flagstaff, but DeMille had taken it upon himself to move the entire company to Hollywood—a place they had never even heard of. After much debate, they cautiously wired DeMille back:

  Authorize you to rent barn, but on month-to-month basis. Don’t make any long commitment. Regards. Jesse and Sam.

  As president of the company, Lasky left for California to check the place out. Arriving in Los Angeles, he called for a taxi and asked to be driven to Hollywood. The cabbie didn’t know how to get there. He stopped at the elegant Alexandria Hotel for directions.

  After cruising along several miles worth of dirt roads, the taxi driver dropped Lasky off at the Hollywood Hotel, which was situated on Hollywood Boulevard between Highland and Orchid Avenues. Once inside, Lasky introduced himself as the head of the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company and asked where his studio was located. The hotel clerk had no idea. Lasky then asked the clerk if he knew Cecil B. DeMille. The clerk had never heard of DeMille either. He did remember, however, that there were some movie folks working out of a barn about six blocks down near some pepper trees in the middle of an orange grove.

  Lasky followed the clerk’s directions and sure enough, he found the barn where DeMille greeted him with a grin: “Welcome to Hollywood, Jesse!”

  Chapter Three

  TEAM BIOGRAPH

  When inventor William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, who helped develop the Kinetoscope, became disenchanted with his boss, Thomas Edison, Dickson designed the Mutoscope. To simulate motion, Dickson’s new machine quickly flipped a series of still photos, while the Kinetoscope relied on a single strip of film moved at a very specific rate. One machine was no better than the other, but the changes were just subtle enough to allow Dickson and his three business partners to establish their own New York film company in 1895—The American Mutoscope Company. The following year, this same group also came up with a machine that projected images on a screen. They called it the Biograph and it rivaled Edison’s Vitascope, which also utilized the projection method. In 1899, almost fifteen years before Jesse Lasky entered the film business, Dickson’s outfit was officially renamed The American Mutoscope and Biograph Company to clearly identify the two types of films they manufactured.

  Because of the differences in its equipment, the new company did not fall prey to Edison’s otherwise wide reach. Instead, it was so successful over the next nine years that they even had international partners who produced and distributed their films around the world and also used their technology. Their heady achievements were mostly credited to a thirty-something former stage player who happened by the studio looking for work in 1908 shortly after the more sophisticated Biograph had completely taken over the Mutoscope. This young actor/writer who went by the stage name Lawrence Griffith joined the team now simply known as The Biograph Company where he continued acting and writing.

  Lawrence Griffith was, in reality, Kentucky-born David Wark Griffith, the son of Lieutenant Colonel Jacob Wark Griffith who had once served in the Confederate Army and his wife, Mary Oglesby. He arrived at the Griffith farm on January 22, 1875—one of their seven children. Jacob, or “Roarin’ Jake” as he was sometimes known, suffered a serious stomach wound during the Civil War. That, however, didn’t deter his keenness for drinking, but for “Roarin’ Jake,” mixing alcohol with a bad stomach turned toxic. After treating himself to pickles followed by a good swig of whiskey, he died in 1882.

  Mary and her children ran the farm until 1890 when she moved them all to Louisville. Young David took odd jobs in an effort to help his family with finances. He worked as an elevator operator, a bookstore clerk and a newspaper reporter. Eventually, he was taken with the theater and became an actor, but he never hit the big time. Instead, he toured with several traveling companies and met his first wife, actress Linda Arvidson, in San Francisco. After the couple married in Boston, they moved to New York in 1906 where Griffith tried his hand at playwriting. Despite having one produced play, he was unable to scrape together a living. In 1908, he hired in at The Biograph Company as an actor and writer, and from there his luck would change.

  Three months after he joined Biograph, the company needed a director so Griffith was promoted to the job. He accepted on the contingency that he could return to acting if his directorial abilities were found lacking. He needn’t have worried. While he was a mediocre actor, in the director’s chair, Griffith and his handpicked teammates saw art where others saw novelty. His cutting edge one-reelers catapulted Biograph into the proverbial spotlight and set the course for future films.

  In addition to his directing duties, he hired several new players including Florence Lawrence and Jeanie Macpherson. At the time, actors were not given on-screen credit for their roles because film companies believed that anonymous actors remained low-paid actors. An otherwise nameless face, Florence Lawrence, originally with Vitagraph, grew into one of Biograph’s most popular players and movie fans simply dubbed her “The Biograph Girl.” Lawrence eventually left Biograph for The Independent Motion Picture Company under the imaginative direction of producer Carl Laemmle who openly identified her through a rigged publicity stunt. Laemmle gave Florence all the credit she deserved once she joined his company and as a result, Florence Lawrence became a household name and the silver screen’s very first movie star.

  Jeanie Macpherson, however, wasn’t content with working in front of the camera—or keeping her feet on the ground. Red-haired and dark-eyed, Jeanie Culbertson Macpherson was born on May 18, 1887 into Boston’s high society. Her father, the Canadian-born John Sinclair Macpherson, was of Scottish descent. Her mother, Evangeline Claire Tomlinson, was a Michigan girl with French roots. Macpherson’s paternal grandfather moved his entire household including servants, teachers and his very own Presbyterian minister from Scotland to America. S.J. Tomlinson, her maternal grandfather, ran a Michigan newspaper. As a young girl, Macpherson also acquired a colorful stepfather resulting from her mother’s second marriage in October 1895 to Chicago’s very own “Barley King,” Henry Joseph O’Neill.

  Once a wealthy man, O’Neill lost his fortune in bad barley investments just before the turn of the century. He claimed that he owed $500,000 to various debtors, but had only $5,000 in assets. He also told the courts that $50,000 of the total amount owed was incurred jointly by him and his wife. The extravagant Evangeline was not about to pay up so she took Jeanie and fled to Montreal. There, she checked into the swanky Windsor Hotel. Her plan was to board a Dominion Line steamer headed to Liverpool and get away from it all—via first class passage. Instead of sailing the next morning, however, Evangeline was arrested. Officials seized all eight of her traveling trunks and took note of her property totaling more than $8,000 in lace, linen, jewelry and silverware. She was released after posting $800 in bail money.

  By 1901, the O’Neills had resolved their credit issues and Jeanie was being schooled in Paris. Upon returning home, she attended Chicago’s Kenwood Institute. Passionate about music, she pursued a career in the opera and also studied dance under the famed Russian-born ballet great Theodore Kosloff. From the Chicago stage, she traveled to New York where she worked in the theater before joining Griffith at Biograph. A quick wit who welcomed a challenge, Macpherson once told Photoplay magazine’s Alice Martin about her first visit to Griffith’s office:

  Mr. Griffith wasn’t in. His assistant was. I told him my stage experience.

  He ignored it, scorned it. “We want to know what you can do before a camera,” he said.

  I said, “If you get me on my Scotch Day, I can’t do anything, but if you get me on my French day, I can do [Italian] parts.”

  According to Macpherson, Griffith quickly hired her to work in his motion pictures. He cast the twenty-one-year-old in her first film, a crime
drama called The Fatal Hour (1908) where she shared screen time with Griffith himself, his wife Linda Arvidson and future Keystone Kop creator Mack Sennett. Over the next few years, Macpherson made more than 100 films at Biograph, dozens of them with an up and coming young actress named Mary Pickford.

  Mary Pickford’s given name was Gladys Louise Smith when she was born on April 8, 1892 in Toronto, Canada. Around 1890, her mother, the hardworking Charlotte Hennessey, had married John Charles Smith, an unreliable man who could down a drink but couldn’t keep a job, as was the issue with so many men in those days, despite the proclivity of temperance societies. Charlotte was the daughter of Catherine Faeley who, as a young girl, traveled with her family from Ireland to Canada. In Quebec, Catherine met her husband, Irishman John Pickford Hennessey who, in a Freudian twist, also liked a drink. Charlotte’s husband, John Charles, was one of twelve children belonging to Sarah and Joseph Smith. The elder Smith was originally from Liverpool, but moved to Canada at an early age. After Gladys’s birth, Charlotte and John Charles had two more children, Lottie followed by John, better known as Jack.

  Around the time that Jack was born, John Charles, no longer interested in his wife and children, left them. Desperate to hold on to her good name, Charlotte declared herself a widow. Ironically by the time Gladys turned six, John Charles actually died of a head injury that he suffered while working on a steamer, bequeathing Charlotte an honest claim to widowhood. Alone with three small children and an ailing mother, Charlotte took in sewing and boarders to help pay the bills. Gladys, always in tune with her mother, took her role as the eldest child very seriously—especially after a local doctor offered to adopt her to ease the number of mouths Charlotte had to feed. When she realized that she would have to leave her mother and her siblings in order to gain financial stability, Gladys refused to go through with the adoption out of sheer stubbornness and a firm resolve to somehow take care of her family. Pickford later recalled:

  A determination was born in me the day of our visit to Dr. Smith [no relation] that nothing could crush; I must try to take my father’s place in some mysterious way, and prevent anything from breaking up my family.

  One of Charlotte’s boarders worked at the nearby Princess Theater. When he suggested that Gladys and Lottie work for him for extra pocket money, Charlotte turned him down. She didn’t want her children exposed to those sinners who called themselves actors, but after a visit to the theater, Charlotte softened. Most of the cast and crew were “regular,” hardworking folks like them, just doing the best they could. The Smith family sorely needed money and once she met the players in person, she found that these sinners were no worse than any other sinners she had known.

  The two Smith sisters debuted in The Silver King written by Henry Arthur Jones at Toronto’s Princess Theater in January 1900 while Charlotte played the organ. Young Gladys tested her acting chops by playing Ned, the main character’s son. As the dainty child stood in front of the audience earning money for her family, a spirited ambition and dogged drive enveloped her. Mature for her age and feeling responsible for her mother and siblings, Gladys embraced the challenge of being the family’s main breadwinner and she never looked back.

  For the next several years, the Smiths joined touring companies that played throughout Canada and the United States. By the time she was nine, Gladys took on starring roles such as Little Eva in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s classic Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Life on the road was often difficult. The nicer hotels wouldn’t rent to “theatricals.” The Smiths often stayed in rundown rooms, took their meals in train stations, sometimes scrounging for food and huddling under newspapers for warmth.

  In between jobs, they stayed in New York where Gladys, still feeling responsible for the well-being of her family, hoped to find permanent work in the city’s theater district. It was no easy task and fifteen-year-old Gladys promised herself that if acting didn’t work out, she would soon trade in the stage for needle and thread. Besides acting, sewing was all she knew how to do, and in her mind, it was the only alternative she had to support her family.

  Before she invested in a sewing machine, however, Gladys set her sights on meeting notable Broadway producer David Belasco. She tried for several weeks to get his attention through letters of introduction and personal visits to his casting office. Nothing worked. Out of ideas, the determined young girl made a drastic move. She approached the maid of popular theater actress Blanche Bates begging her to intercede on her behalf. In turn, the maid pleaded with Bates to help the young actress. At the maid’s urgings, Bates gave Gladys permission to use her name—sight unseen. Gladys then marched into Belasco’s office and told his staff that Bates had sent her. Belasco finally agreed to meet the persistent young girl.

  A nervous Gladys introduced herself to the legendary producer. He was amused by her youth and tenacity, but thought that the name “Gladys Smith” didn’t suit her. Belasco asked what other names might be in her family. She rattled off a few, but when she got to “Pickford,” he stopped her. She then told him that her baptismal name was Marie. On the spot, Belasco re-christened her Mary Pickford. He also cast her in his production of The Warrens of Virginia written by none other than William C. DeMille.

  The play ran on Broadway from December 1907 through May 1908, after which Pickford joined the touring company. Her steady income, most of which she turned over to Charlotte, ended when the play finally folded in March 1909. Out of work and still feeling responsible for her family, Pickford reluctantly considered a new and far less familiar medium—the movies. Charlotte suggested The Biograph Company and Pickford, who almost always listened to her mother, agreed to give it a try. By this point, D.W. Griffith was making a name for himself as the Biograph director and had been known to hire stage actresses in the past. Convincing herself that this was only a temporary job, Pickford entered the Biograph studio where she encountered Griffith for the first time.

  Pickford prided herself on her professional acting experience, but her stage credentials didn’t impress Griffith. He eyed her up and down wondering how she might come across on film. There was only one way to find out and Griffith himself prepared her for a screen test. She felt nervous and quite awkward in front of the camera until one of the actors, Owen Moore, asked: “Who’s the dame?”

  Pickford’s acting came to a sudden halt as she bellowed: “How dare you, sir, insult me? I’ll have you understand I’m a perfectly respectable young girl, and don’t you dare call me a bad name!” Griffith lost his patience and scolded her for disrupting the film, but by the time Pickford completed the screen test, her scrappiness had won him over. A calmer Griffith invited her to return to Biograph the next day. Still skeptical of the movie business and embarrassed by her faux pas, Pickford agreed to come back, but deep down wondered what Griffith might really be after. She was also pretty certain that her work at Biograph would be as insignificant as a mite of dust in a windstorm and every bit as temporary.

  The next day, Griffith cast an unenthusiastic Pickford as an extra in a Florence Lawrence comedy called Her First Biscuits (1909). The seventeen-year-old didn’t stay in the background for long. She was just warming up and like the dutiful daughter she was, she kept her unconventional family fed, clothed and protected. She also kept them close to her, still craving the comfort of their shielding presence. Soon the ambitious young actress, now comfortable in the new film medium, stepped out of the crowd and into the lead roles. By the end of 1909, Florence Lawrence had left Biograph for producer Carl Laemmle’s Independent Motion Picture Company and Pickford was popular enough with moviegoers to inherit her title, “The Biograph Girl.”

  The following January, Griffith took a Biograph acting company to California to finish filming scenes for The Newlyweds (1910). The story, about a young girl who falls in love and then runs away with a Native American boy, took place on a California ranch. The rough New York winter wasn’t quite the atmosphere he was looking for so Griffith chose to complete his film in Los Angeles where the outd
oor scenery would be more authentic. He also wanted to check out the area hoping that Biograph would set up a permanent studio on the sun-filled west coast.

  Back east, early films were often made on city rooftops where sunlight could be captured at its brightest. The summer months worked fine, but the dark dismal winters made filming difficult if not downright impossible. To escape the inclement weather and to continue working, some film companies headed west on a seasonal basis. In California, they found everything they might want—the city, the country, the sea, the mountains and the fair weather, particularly the almost constant sunshine.

  Now starring in The Newlyweds, Pickford joined Griffith and his gang as they headed west. Her brother, Jack, was not part of the crew, but at the last minute Charlotte put him on the train as it slowly pulled out of the station. He had no luggage, just an order from his mother to look after his big sister. A disappointed Jeanie Macpherson was not invited on the road trip and cried as her coworkers left without her.

  Once in Los Angeles, Griffith rented a loft to store equipment as well as a vacant lot located at Grand Avenue and Washington Street to be used for outdoor filming. Pickford described their working studio:

  Our stage consisted of an acre of ground, fenced in, and a large wooden platform, hung with cotton shades that were pulled on wires overhead. On a windy day our clothes and curtains on the set would flap loudly in the breeze. Studios were all on open lots—roofless and without walls, which explains the origin of the term “on the lot” …