American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century (26 page)

Inspired by the era’s celebrated muckrakers, D.W. had refused to stay sequestered with his crew in the brownstone on Fourteenth Street. Time after time he left the film studio, headed downtown, and with a crusader’s zeal aimed his camera at the crowds and tumult of the tenement streets. “Rivington Street,” the director would explain, “never appeared as a melting pot to me, but more like a boiling pot.”

A Child of the Ghetto
and
Simple Charity
were melodramas, but they also might have been documentaries, so vividly did the shots reveal the harshness of life in the city.
The Lily of the Tenements
as well as
A Corner in Wheat
were plaintive editorials calling for fairer prices and better working conditions.
One Is Business, the Other Crime
challenged American justice: one set of laws for the rich, and another far less equitable or objective for the poor. And in the union leader’s favorite film, the 1908
The Song of the Shirt,
Griffith had made a call to join labor’s battles against unjust management.

The plot in
Song,
Gompers could only shrug in uncritical agreement, was nothing more than a heart-tugging melodrama. A sweet-looking sewing machine girl conscientiously works to buy food and medicine for her bed-ridden sister. A small imperfection, however, is found in one of the shirts she has sewn. The factory owner and the manager ignore her pleas. They refuse to pay for work that they capriciously decide is slipshod. So the girl trudges home. And her sister, without the life-saving medicine, dies.

But despite the dank predictability of its narrative, Griffith’s artistry gave the film a power of advocacy that Gompers couldn’t help but admire. The director had repeatedly cut back and forth between scenes of management and labor, and each of the contrasts fell like an indictment. The seamstress hovers over her sick sister’s bed, while the factory owner menaces his underlings; the factory owner frolics with a showgirl in a restaurant, while the seamstress dutifully sews in her wretched apartment and her sister writhes in pain; the factory owner drinks champagne, dances, and kisses showgirls, while in the seamstress’s arms, the sister dies a wrenching painful death. It was all there in pictures on the screen, Gompers rejoiced. It was what the struggle was all about.

And so it came to him, with Darrow, Burns, and Griffith all helpfully nudging the idea along. It would rally people to labor’s side; trump the malicious stories the opposition was gleefully spreading; and get workers to reach readily into their pockets to contribute to the cause. Gompers decided to have a film made about J.J. McNamara.

It was called
A Martyr to His Cause,
and it began like a fairy tale. Which was appropriate since it had just as much relation to reality.

Once upon a time a boyishly handsome seventeen-year-old J.J. left his doting parents’ loving home to go out into the world. He promises, the opening title card reports, “to be a good boy and to play fair in all that he does.” He finds a job as an ironworker, and we see actual footage—the impressive documentary touch inspired by the realism in D.W.’s films—of men fearlessly balanced on beams hanging high in the sky and matter-of-factly passing red-hot rivets to one another. J.J.’s remarkable journey continues, and “through his industry and sobriety,” another title card explains, he is promoted to foreman and is subsequently elected secretary of the union.

Then disaster strikes. Management declares war against the unions. The courts and police join in, acting, a new card states, “contrary to the laws and traditions of our republic.”

The film makes no mention of the
Times
bombing. As if he were simply the victim of cruel fate, J.J. becomes a blameless casualty of the unprovoked warfare. A rotund, striped-pants capitalist orders a hulking, snarling Burns to steal union property and then kidnap J.J. to stand trial. Burns obeys his master’s command and happily gives J.J. a ferocious beating in the process.

The final scene is a tearjerker. The saintly gray-haired mum sits alone, weeping the tears of immense sorrow as she reads the letter her son has sent from his prison cell. “I am innocent of any infraction of the law,” J.J. insists with steely defiance. He asks that his mother and the rest of the nation refrain from passing judgment “until a fair and full defense has been afforded.”

The two-reel film, produced by the W.H. Seeley Company, was advertised as “The Greatest Moving Picture of the Twentieth Century.” Still, Frank Morrison, the AFL secretary, felt compelled to admit to Darrow in a letter that “the story of the picture as it is ready for exhibition, and the story from which it is taken, very often differ materially.”

But Darrow did not mind. The film opened in Cincinnati, and in its first week 50,000 people went to see it. Then it moved on to play to crowds all across the country. The hope was that the film would earn $100,000 for the defense fund, perhaps more. Either way, it would be a shrewd return on the $2,577 that the union had paid for the twenty-scene film.

The film made Billy livid. He hated the way he was depicted. A fearsome bruiser? A torturer? How could anyone twist the truth with such guiltless agility? he wondered with the facile innocence of the self-righteous. But Billy was also astute. His first meeting with D.W. Griffith had been prompted by his recognition of the affecting power that a film could have on a murderer’s shaky mind. Now he began to consider other possibilities for the moving pictures.
Martyr
showed him that a film could persuade. And what had worked for labor would work for capital, too. So he suggested to his biggest client, the American Bankers Association, that they commission a film to counter labor’s griping about low wages. It took some persuading, but the bankers eventually grasped the wisdom of Billy’s advice. For a moment they even discussed approaching the great D.W. Griffith to direct their film, but when they learned that the director was under exclusive contract to Biograph, they quickly dropped the idea.

The Rewards of Thrift
told the happy story of a conscientious worker who saved his money, avoided the temptation of alcohol, and was able to afford to buy his own home.

The bankers were very pleased with the result and quickly made plans to commission more films. The fact that they stood to make a sizable profit from the production, the bankers agreed, was only further proof of the fundamental rightness of its message.

THIRTY-THREE

______________________

B
ACK IN NEW YORK CITY
that same May, a riot erupted in a Brooklyn movie theater. D.W. had just returned from his long winter’s shooting in L.A., and when he read the story in the
New York Call,
it jolted him. It was as if he understood for the first time the potential in the flow of energy that was on the screen. He now knew: At his command was “a new force in the intellectual world as revolutionary as electricity.”

Ironically, the film that had been shown at the Folly Theater in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, was not one of his. But given the audience’s negative reaction, D.W. quickly reminded himself, perhaps that was just as well.
The Strike at the Mines
was an Edison production. It had been advertised as an account of the famous coal strike in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania. More than ten thousand men, women, and children had marched on the picket lines in often punishing weather and had stood up to the owners’ truncheon-waving goons. Week after week for nearly a year the bitter confrontation had dragged on. To workers across America, the strikers’ resolve was heroic. Yet the movie told a different story. On the screen hordes of thuggish union men go on a rampage, attacking defenseless scabs and then demolishing the mining compound with joyful abandon. When the film’s hero, an orphaned worker, atones for his brutal behavior and pleads with a kind-hearted mine manager to take him back, the audience in Brooklyn had seen enough.

“Lies,” people shouted. “Lies.” Seats were broken apart and the pieces hurled in protest at the screen. As if one, the audience stood and stomped their feet in unison. A large angry noise thundered through the theater. It kept building until the projectionist, perhaps fearful for his own safety, stopped the film.

When D.W. read this account, his heart leaped, and he might just as well have stomped his feet, too. His reaction, though, wasn’t prompted by an urge to show solidarity with the protesters. True, this was a film he would never have made. His sympathies were with the poor and the working class, and he turned out movies that, as much by instinct as design, condemned the greedy clique that he felt controlled America. But he was a storyteller, not an activist. It would be several years before he would be emboldened to write an article for the
Los Angeles Citizen
entitled “Motion Pictures Can Be Made to Help and Hearten Labor.” Nevertheless, he took great satisfaction in the audience’s uproar at the Folly Theater. It had crystallized his thoughts and at the same time reassured his nagging doubts about the importance of his new profession.

For he had had doubts. Only “a matter of dumb luck,” D.W. knew only too well, had taken him on his rapid journey from the stage to the moving pictures. But after spending the three years exploring the new world where fate had landed him, D.W. had finally come to appreciate its richness. “Now he has a vision,” his friend Lionel Barrymore, the actor, recognized. “He really believes we’re pioneering in a new art—a medium that can cross barriers of language and culture.”

D.W.’s commitment to this vision ran deep. In one of his rare bursts of temper, the director had lashed out at a Biograph ingenue whom he had overheard talking about the “flickers.” He reprimanded, “Never let me hear that word in this studio. Just remember,” he continued to lecture, “you’re no longer working in some second-rate theatrical company. What we do here will be seen tomorrow by people all over America—people all over the world. Just remember that the next time you go before a camera.”

With a convert’s fervor, D.W. had come to believe that movies could do “more than entertain.” They were “a moral and educational force,” a way “to bring out the truth about unjust social and economic conditions.” What was on the screen could make people laugh or cry or even think. The tumult at the Folly Theater had proven to D.W. that a film had the strength to reach out and literally pull people to their feet. Had any storyteller in history, he wondered with pride and gratitude, ever been able to harness his muse to such a power?

Yet even as a fortified D.W. charged toward new creative battles, he found himself, not unlike Darrow, facing old ones. Mary Pickford had returned. And with her arrival, the old torments and insecurities resurfaced.

Mary’s marriage had been a mistake; “five years of despair,” she called it. Her brief contracts with IMP and then Majestic Pictures had also been unsatisfactory interludes. So she went to the Biograph Studio, and D.W., with no apparent hesitation or resentment, signed her up.

Mary was twenty-one. Her bundle of curls was still golden, and the passing of the years had blessed her face with a chameleon beauty. She could glisten with a coquette’s bright charm in one take; in the next, her big demon eyes would be fired up with a sharp womanly wisdom. And from the start Mary and D.W.—or “His Majesty,” as she now dubbed him—were once again locked in to their strained and disquieting relationship. He was obsessed by her, yet at the same time he knew Mary’s stiff-backed reserve made her ultimately unattainable. She resented the power D.W. had over her career, yet at the same time she knew his director’s skills enhanced her natural talent. And so he pushed and she pulled—until it was her turn to push, and his to pull.

D.W. tried to make Mary jealous, or maybe he simply needed the comfort that comes with reciprocated affection. What is certain is that D.W. sent a telegram and a prepaid ticket to Mae Marsh in California. He wanted her to come to New York and appear in his films.

Mae was just seventeen, the younger sister of the glamorous titian-haired Margaret Loveridge, who had joined the company the past winter in California. Mae had been hanging around the set, fascinated by her big sister’s intriguing world, when she caught the director’s eye.

As it happened, Linda, recently separated from D.W. (their legal divorce would drag on for rancorous decades), witnessed this moment. Years later the scene continued to play out acidly in her memory: “Little sister was a mite: most pathetic and half-starved she looked in her wispy clothes, with stockings sort of falling down over her shoe-tops. No one paid a particle of attention to the child. But Mr. Griffith popped up from somewhere and spied her, and gave her a smile. The frail, appealing look of her struck him. So he said, ‘How’d
you
like to work in a picture?’ ”

And so Mae’s moving picture career began; and in due course, so did her off-screen relationship with the director. She was young, vulnerable, and fatherless—all traits that pulled D.W. to her as though they were magnets. There was something else, too. “Your talking and giggling make me forget my worries for a time,” he confided to her.

As soon as Mae arrived in New York, D.W. set to work playing her against Mary. The director was preparing to shoot
Man’s Genesis,
a story set in prehistoric times. Full of mischief, he offered Mary the female lead. With great indignation, she refused. As D.W. knew she would.

Mary was too proper to wear the grass skirt that the role required. “I’m sorry, Mr. Griffith,” she told him, “but the part calls for bare legs and feet.”

Mae, however, was untroubled. She possessed none of Mary’s icy demure. She took the part and had a good time showing off her shapely legs in the process.

When the camera stopped rolling, D.W. assembled the company and made an announcement: “I should like to say for the benefit of those who may be interested that as a reward for her graciousness Miss Marsh will also receive the role of the heroine in
The Sands of Dee.
”