From Photoplay, July 1916, 124–32. This interview is adapted from part two of Gordon’s six-part series, “The Story of David Wark Griffith.” Part six of the series appeared under the title “The Real Story of Intolerance.” The page numbers given above relate to this adaptation; the full citation reads pp. 122–32.
He [Griffith] grinned. “I will not unfold all the secrets of my young life,” was his response, “and as to being a book agent, I refuse to incriminate myself. I stand mute. But I admit selling the Encyclopedia Britannica; that isn’t a book, it is a freight commodity.
“I did not sell very many— but even an occasional sale carried a very fat commission and enabled me to pack a meal ticket with my sample bindings, and to travel in railway cars in place of underneath them on a brakebeam.
“I early learned to use means to discover the men who would likely want to listen to a seller of books; and had my friends and acquaintances trained to report to me information that might lead to a dicker.
“There was a day when some one told some one else to tell me that Cousin Janie had said to Uncle Sawyer that Jim Dodson had heard Sam Roller from down river say that there was a man living at Burgoyne côte house who owned a Bible and a dictionary, and who wanted an encyclopedia.”
Griffith told the rest of the story just as an amusing effort of a man hard put to it. But it thoroughly illustrates the resiliency of his mind, and— it may be valuable to book agents.
“My man lived in a country of pork and ‘sides’ diet,” he said. “It was a hard grinding school I had been through; one that had taught me to think before acting. Knowing the value put on fresh meat in that region, I gambled quite a bit of my resources and bought a lot of good steaks. I could have used those steaks myself to advantage— but business is business and strategy is strategy.
“In a buggy with my bundle of steaks and my sample bindings and pages, we started one evening for my man.
“There were not any roads thereabout when it rained. And it rained. We upset, we were bogged, but we managed to make progress until, while driving through a thick woods, a panther agilely dropped to the seat beside me from an overhanging tree, and I dropped out of the buggy. The beast had sniffed the odor of those steaks.
“There was a pretty scrap while it lasted, but the panther was dislodged before the steaks were swallowed, and we drove on.
“The farmer gave me shelter for the night, and for breakfast I presented my steaks, and before lunch I had made my sale.”
This incident put Griffith in a reminiscent mood, and he kept on— oblivious of the notes being taken.
“Success does not make a fellow feel a bit proud, even if he realizes, as any honest, successful man must realize, how little there really is to achievement,” he observed.
“For a long time I was proudest over a journey I made from Minneapolis to my home on a capital of fifteen cents; and I still had the fifteen cents when I reached my destination.
“That was one of my early adventures on ‘blind baggage’ cars and brakebeams.
“I had been acting, when the ghost which had limped sadly for some weeks failed to walk, even with crutches.
“Luck had been favorable; I had made a living and had sent some money home, but back of the situation was a formidable oath I had taken when I struck out for myself that never would I ask for help from those I had left behind; as for meals and shelter, during a financial squall, that was different, and my thoughts and my feet turned toward the old plantation.
“There is considerable alertness required to swing onto a ‘blind baggage’ at the maximum of speed, to combine the minimum chance of discovery. When it happened that I was thrown off a train, I did odd jobs wherever I found myself, until the chance came rolling down the track again for another stage of the journey.
“Along with the experience was a knowledge gained of the great army of vagabonds who constantly migrate simply from the love of wandering, the enjoyment of the savor of change. During those years I met in more or less intimacy all kinds and conditions of men— all kinds; what Kipling wrote of the Colonel’s Lady and Judy O’Grady being just alike under the skin is equally true about the intellect of the ‘pike’ and the university gentle; the yegg and the poet, the peripatetic and the stationary philosopher.
“No matter how contorted one way or another the soul may be, the man is still a man and with recognizable traits of relationship to all men.
“Somewhat illustrative of the domination of circumstances over mental attitudes is just another instance of— at the time— great pride to me.
“This was an occasion around the warm cinders which had been drawn from the fire boxes of the locomotives in a roundhouse; the company was an assembly of tramps— hobos they are called now— and I was given the center of the stage, the best place at the ashes, and called on for a monologic account of the longest uninterrupted blind baggage ride then on record, something over two hundred miles out of Chicago.
“Louisville had again attracted me. A company had gone broke in Chicago and I with it. The way to arrive at a place, I had learned, is to start for it; so I walked from Downtown in Chicago to Englewood, and there a train whizzed along so fast that the crew was not watching, feeling that no ticketless tourist would take the chance. This one did, and landed safely. It was a wild night stormy and freezing; the crew of the train stuck to their snug quarters, not knowing their flying bailiwick had been invaded, until one brakeman made a perfunctory inspection. I also had grown careless from long immunity and sleepiness.
“Consciousness returned violently when I was assailed by two bulging red fists, accompanied by much language. We made an even match; but a second brakeman hovered along and then it was all over. I reposed gracefully on a snow bank with many minor injuries to my person and a realization that Louisville was a great deal farther away than when I had been in Chicago.
“Something led me to walk a bit, and I came to the round-house, the pile of warm cinders and the gallant company of the Knights of Disindustry. When my story was heard there was acclaim, unenvious and generous comment, and the warmest place by the cinders.
“Which is generally more than a man is given when he succeeds with people who are— not hoboes.”
There are many peppery stories about the studios of Griffith’s courage and strength. Any man who has a Duke of Wellington nose can be relied on for courage; as for Griffith’s physical strength, a glance at him shows litheness, not massive, but a very athletic example of bodily architecture, and the celebrity of movement which frequently arrives so rapidly as to defeat more potent but more sluggish muscles.
It is possible that he is a bit proud of his sturdy sinews. He climbs about all manner of places in his studio in order to study perspective, or whatever it is a director has to study, and it is axiomatic about the place that he never has asked any man or woman to do a “stunt” that included the precarious without first doing the same thing himself.
There was one occasion when this chronicler saw that trait bloom out.
There was a “set” arranged for an escaped lion to wander into a hotel office with panicky results among the guests, principal of whom was De Wolf Hopper. The lion was in his cage, ready to be prodded onto the scene; the “set” was surrounded by heavy wire barricades, the cameraman being encased in a tooth-proof wire redoubt; several extra people and the beast’s trainer were on the scene ready for rehearsal, and Mr. Hopper was outside the barrier waiting his cue. He was quite willing to go on with the lion, but there is really no use in cluttering up things until your call comes, and, anyway, the lion animal is perfectly harmless. Then came the story from an old-time attaché of the studio in graphic detail of how that same lion a year before had with neatness and dispatch removed two ribs from an actor while feeling playful.
Just before the director was to begin, Griffith walked on the scene, fussed about with the lion, pulled his ears and frolicked with him.
Everyone else then made friends with the animal, and the play went on with Mr. Hopper. Well, of course he knew all the time the lion was a good sort, and there’s never any danger with a lion if you make him understand you’re not afraid of him— Come here, Nero old top!
There is a story told by his pals of the Biograph of how Griffith, requiring some exercise, had a middleweight prize fighter come to box with him, and how at the first lesson Griffith knocked the bruiser down and out.
One man told the story and then whispered that the fighter had been doing some acting himself; that he felt there would be more money in the lessons if the employer were to be thoroughly convinced of his own latent superiority. Such things have been known to occur. Royalty rarely finds a courtier skillful enough to be victor in a bridge set-to; it isn’t done. If that boxer was not knocked down at once by his employer he is a very poor fighter— with his mind.
But the somewhat slender, very agile picture-creator is quite able to take care of himself under all conditions; he proved this in his early directing, when roughnecks formed the artists of the lens and when the methods and etiquette of a second mate were essential to the handling of the crew of a movie.
It was when Griffith himself told of another venture into the land of ferocious effort that it was made evident why his surprising elasticity of physical resource is what it is.
“Nothing had changed my decision to be the world’s greatest literary man,” he explained while still discussing his life before the studio gave shelter; “and I felt that as a preparatory study, before I could have the world of letters at my feet, it might be useful to know a little more about certain phases of life commonly unfamiliar.
“My other adventures had been made of necessity; this was one of choice, for the knowledge of the working man— the toiler— I thought would be valuable.
“There was no financial need spurring me to ride hard over the rough spots in the highway of existence; a comfortable sum of a few hundred dollars had been accumulated by some occasional good fortune in the theater, and my duties toward those at home had been met.
“To be a puddler [working with clay and water to compact it] in a foundry, to do the real ‘muscle-stretching,’ bone-bending work, and to live among the men who did such work, was my ambition, and naturally I went to Tonawanda. I didn’t work at puddling first, but shoveling ore out of a ship’s hold into the crane buckets.
“There were no union restrictions as to hours or anything; the pay was not by the day but by the piece; so much money for every ton of ore shoveled; it was good enough pay, so good that if a man would work until he dropped in his tracks he could pick up twenty dollars or so at a piece.
“It was work under tremendous competitive conditions; I mean the competition of emulation.
“Men would shovel down in that grimy, stuffy hold until they dropped in their tracks from utter exhaustion; then they would be chucked into one of the steel buckets, hoisted to the deck and flung to one side, to come to, or go to, as they listed.
“Under that stint system that work was probably the hardest in the world; for young men it was beautifully healthful; it was not long before I found myself capable of shoveling ore for twenty-four hours at a stretch. In some traits the men were as hard and exhausting as the life; they were naturally circumscribed, and if their daily existence was an orgy of labor, their life when released from toil was just as strenuous in their efforts to win relief.
“So, in one way or another, under this or that circumstance, my life flowed on, with no approachment to that laurel wreath of literature; I was acting most of the time, and essaying a few other lines of livelihood.”
There is a singular lack of information as to Griffith’s stage career; the few testimonies at hand all trend to the one definition of his exceptional ability, which appeared to be handicapped by disinclination to do roles in certain prescribed manners and methods.
Those few actors who have known him when he was a “talkie” agree that his work was exceptionally clever, and most of them qualify it by the term “original,” which in theater patter usually means that an actor has a brain.
That as a rule is a drag to his progress. Stage directors have brains— always; and if an actor should have the habit of thinking, you can see it would be very embarrassing for the director; therefrom has grown the obvious fact that actors seldom think for themselves; they prefer to hold their jobs.
There is reason to believe Griffith learned to be one of the latter class of histrions— also that he did not like to be.
James Neill, who used to be a stock king in the West in those years when Chicago was still spoken of as a Western city, once employed Griffith; it was in one of the Neill stock companies, at that period known in Chicago as the Neill Alhambra Stock.
Mr. Neill had several stock companies then, and when he visited his Chicago theater he found them doing The Ensign [by William Haworth] with a particularly good Abraham Lincoln.
“In The Ensign,” says Mr. Neill in telling about the incident, “we never gave Lincoln any lines, just as few words as we could get by with in the scene. It was thought that the public would resent any attempt to carry Lincoln as far as really acting on the stage, so the part was kept almost entirely pantomimic— what we call in the pictures ‘registering’— and I noticed the admirable way the young fellow playing Lincoln did this very ‘registering’ stuff.
“I asked my stage director, who was Oscar Eagle, about the actor and he told me he was a ‘rather bright young fellow named Griffith,’ and somehow the matter dropped, and he never came into my mind again until a short time ago.
“I had been doing pictures, but the company I was working for cut down, and I wanted a position.
“The first place I called was the Griffith studio, and when I saw him I at once remembered our Lincoln in The Ensign years ago. Mr. Griffith recalled the circumstance to me, and I rather apologized— for we had only paid him eighteen dollars a week.
“‘It was a poor salary we paid you, Mr. Griffith,’ I said.
“‘It was a very good salary,’ he replied, ‘for I needed it tremendously, and it was much more than I was worth then, for I was a beginner.’
“No, I did not go to work for Griffith, thought he made it evident that I probably could have done so; but before I could get farther with the application something else came to hand, and I have not had occasion to see him since.
“He has always been spoken of in the profession by those who knew him in his acting days as ‘a gifted young man.’”
… Griffith likes those reminiscent glances at what were cruel but savory experiences.
As to the ore-shoveling he said: “It was corking good. I feel the benefit of it every day I live; it gave me physical resilience, fortitude, and some little muscle which has been of particular value to me many times.
“Every phase of life is good for you if you face it all rightly, with fine cheer.
“For tramps, artists, ironworkers, actors, writers— all of us— are alike in our souls; it was in knowing all manner of men that I derived my most useful education.”
“And then came the movies?” he was asked.
“And then came the photoplay,” was his reply.
You mustn’t use the word “movies” to some of the picture people any more. They like to refer to the early films as “movies” but believe it is not sufficiently dignified or expressive of the artistic films of today.
“It happened very casually, as most events do occur, for it proved to be an event to me,” he went on. “It was one day in Chicago when with a friend I was knocking about town with no purpose in immediate view; he suggested that we go to a picture show.
“Never having seen one, the suggestion was inviting. We went; it was some boreful affair, exactly what, I have forgotten; my friend liked it greatly, but I found it silly, tiresome, inexcusable. It was in no way worth while.
“But the great interest the audience evinced impressed me, and made me think; it seemed that if a thing which could attract the public as that picture did were to be done, it should be done better.
“‘What do you think of it?’ asked my friend.
“‘That any man who enjoys such a thing should be shot at sunrise,’ was my response.
“He looked at me in wonder and talked on, explaining why the picture was great; and when we went out he called my attention to the line of people waiting to enter the theater.
“Things did not go very well just then for me; I found myself out of work, and all the time pictures were being talked of, and unconsciously that interested audience and the line of people waiting outside stuck in my mind.
“Probably then, as now, there was no egotism in my thinking that I could write far better scenarios than were being shown, and that the acting of the pictures could be improved.
“As to whether I seriously at that time gave any studied effort to the new profession I cannot say; it is probable that unconsciously I gave it all considerably more attention than I then realized. For it was a prospect, and the feeling that you can do something perhaps a little better than it is being done makes interest acutely active.
“Finally I wrote a scenario and took it to the Edison studio. I left it and was told I would receive an answer.
“That scenario is still on file there, I presume; I never heard anything of it since.”
There have been several notable philosophers who have ascribed the quality of success to the faculty of saying “No.” Truly, “No” has saved many dollars and delirium tremens. But the ready negative in creative affairs has lost more fortunes for its users than “Yes” ever has gained.
… The biography of that Edisonian who filed the Griffith scenario and forgot about its existence because it was “bum,” would make interesting reading; it was probably so very negative that he said, “It was no good nohow.”
Griffith’s knuckles were calloused by that time, so he did not suffer particular disappointment at no results from the Edison folk.
But with head up and straight-eyed, he wrote another scenario and took it to the Biograph. They bought it for fifteen dollars and said he might bring some more if he liked.
He liked very much.
And he wrote more; the money came at the generous— then— rate of fifteen dollars for a half-reel and twenty-five for a full-reel picture.
“I managed to make enough to live on— with the aid of Hope,” he says of those days; and then he got the chance to stage The Adventures of Dollie [released July 14, 1908], and that made him a Biograph fixture, and his life work was begun.
Dollie was quite an absurd young thing, flippantly of the Bertha M. Clay type, who found her habitat in nickelodeons; but Dollie dead, now buried in an unnamed grave of forgetfulness, played the part of Providence; Dollie brought the brain to its haven, where it could bigly work out its destiny.
She graciously opened the door of the Biograph studio to Griffith, a door that was not to be closed on him until he shut it himself and entered wider, more shining portals of consummate effort.