In the early Winter of 1915 I went to the stage production of “Maria Rosa.” Who that witnessed the same performance can ever forget the creation of Mr. Lou Tellegen? That Latin lover whose ferocity showed in every silken accent, in every gesture of panther-like, slim body—to-day this lingers with me as among the most telling of dramatic brush-strokes.

How distinctly I remember the first day that the young foreign actor, who, previous to his triumph in “Maria Rosa” had been hailed as “Bernhardt’s beautiful leading man,” came to my office! We were talking about salary when suddenly Tellegen jumped up from his chair and walked over to look at a photograph on the wall.

“Who is that?” he asked, peering at the face in the frame.

“Oh,” answered I, “don’t you know her? That’s Geraldine Farrar.”

“Oh, yes, the famous singer,” he responded, never taking his eyes from the dazzling victorious face. “H’m—very, very beautiful, is she not?” he mused.

I had hoped that he was perhaps permanently swept away from the theme which he had relinquished so abruptly. I had, however, underrated Mr. Tellegen’s powers of recuperation. A moment more and he was standing before me with a light in his eyes very different from that evoked by the abstract consideration of Beauty.

“Let us say a thousand dollars a week,” said he. “Certainly after all my experience I ought to be worth that.”

Mention of Mr. Tellegen brings me logically to one achievement of my life which I always survey with pride. The year and a half that had elapsed since the production of “The Squaw Man” had brought almost incredible improvements in both the manufacture and presentation of photo-plays. The modern system of lighting had replaced our former reliance upon the rays of the sun. More and more we had substituted the carpenter for the scene-painter. As to the motion-picture theatre itself, this of course presented an aspect very different from the peanut-strewn area which in 1913 had suggested my great enterprise.

However, in spite of orchestral accompaniments and high-priced seats, in spite of the growing ascendancy of such screen stars as Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin, the motion-pictures were merely popular. They were not fashionable. How to make them so, how to intrigue that shy marginal group known as “the carriage trade”—here was the challenge offered to the producer of 1915.

It was about this time that Morris Gest came to me and said: “I think I’ve about got Geraldine Farrar to the point where she’s willing to go into motion-pictures. What’s more, I believe she’ll come with you instead of with Zukor, for the idea of California is attractive to her, especially if she can go and come in a private car.”

After a smile at this approach to the situation on the part of Miss Farrar I asked him, “But how does the famous prima donna look these days?”

“Wonderful? More beautiful than ever,” retorted Gest.

On the first evening when Lasky and I called at Miss Farrar’s home we found that Gest’s enthusiasm was not misplaced. As she swept into the drawing-room to greet us we both thought we had never in our lives seen any one so beautiful.

It did not take long to arrange matters between us. Miss Farrar agreed to go to California for eight weeks to make three pictures—“Maria Rosa,” “Carmen,” and “Temptation.” For these services she was to receive twenty thousand dollars and, in consideration of the modesty of the sum—she would have realised more for a concert tour of the same length—we agreed to supply her with a special car to and from Los Angeles, together with a furnished house, servants, and food during the period of her stay.

On all such minor points Miss Farrar was immediately reasonable. Only in one subject did she display any vital curiosity.

“Whom are you going to engage for my leading man,” she asked.

“Never mind. It will be somebody that you’ll like,” we assured her.

“But,” she urged, “you know it’s very important that my Don JosÉ should be right. Otherwise the performance would be ruined.”

Again we assured her that she was sure to be satisfied with our provision for this part.

“But who is he?” she insisted. “I want to know his name.”

We evaded this request. And we kept on evading it throughout our subsequent interviews. This was not easy, for in every spare moment the prima donna would plead with me, “Why won’t you tell me his name?” It was almost the first question she asked after she stepped from the special train bearing her into California.

So many people have asked me for my first impression of Geraldine Farrar that I should like to interpolate here my response to that frequent inquiry. If you can picture a flowering arbour and then picture the subsequent surprise of finding inside of it a perfectly good dynamo you will have conceived the full force of Miss Farrar’s personality. At the time when I met her she was in her early thirties and that beauty of lucent grey eyes and curving lips—the flowering vigour of look which she doubtless inherited from some ancestress of the Irish seas—was then at its height. Under this screen of physical allure I felt from the very first moment the pulse of a mind restless, eager, alert to every possibility of learning.

Indeed, the figure with which I started falls short of conveying the full effect of Miss Farrar’s presence. Not only does she charge the atmosphere with that mental vitality of hers, she creates the impression always of cutting—cutting straight through any given subject. If I had said, therefore, that the arbour concealed one of those marvellous implements that cut, thrash, and sack the grain, all in a single operation, I should have come nearer the ideal of description.

Miss Farrar is, like Mary Pickford, a captain of industry. She has the same masculine grasp of business, the same masculine approach to work. The difference between them is construed not alone by the immeasurably greater cultural equipment of Miss Farrar but by many temperamental divergences. Whereas Mary Pickford’s manner and voice are always marked by the feminine, almost childlike appeal to which I have referred, the prima donna’s speech has a man’s directness of import. She picks her words for strength, as might a Jack London sea-captain or an Elizabethan soldier. And her utterance of these words reveals the same strange compound of qualities I have noted elsewhere. It is an enunciation both flowering and incisive.

The cantatrice’s entrance into Hollywood was an unprecedented one. The Mayor of Los Angeles was there to welcome her to California. So were five thousand school children. Cowboys in their chaps and sombreros added their customary picturesqueness to the scene. Flowers were everywhere. All Los Angeles reminded you of a festa day in some Italian city. Nowadays we are so accustomed to spectacular personages in the motion-pictures that it is hard to recapture for you the thrill that shook the entire country when Geraldine Farrar, the queen of the Metropolitan Opera House, came to California.

The night following Miss Farrar’s arrival we gave her a dinner at the Hollywood Hotel. This dinner included among its two hundred guests, not only the leading representatives of the screen colony, but a number of distinguished sojourners. Among the latter may be mentioned Mr. John Drew and Miss Blanche Ring.

At this dinner-party Miss Farrar turned to me almost at once with her habitual question. “And now surely,” she pleaded, “you’re going to tell me who is to be my Don JosÉ?”

De Mille and I exchanged a haggard glance. Many, many times had we shuddered together over the thought, “What if she doesn’t like him?” Our previous experience with stars had taught us not to minimise that possible calamity.

“Tell me,” repeated our great planet. “Not another minute will I wait!”

I was just about to reply when I looked up. A tall young man had entered the door and was now walking toward us. He was only twenty-three. His evening clothes were by no means faultless, but the face above them was flushed with excitement. The blue eyes shone. I had never seen Wallace Reid look more like the beautiful and romantic young man of the daguerreotype collection.

“There,” I whispered, watching her tensely, “there is your leading man.”

She had already noticed him and as he moved slowly toward us she never took her eyes from his face. At last, just before he reached us, she began slowly nodding her head. “Very good,” she whispered, and the smile with which she said it lingered as she repeated the encomium. “Very, very good.”

I do not need to dwell upon the relief afforded to us by that smile. I venture to suggest, however, that it may have brought corresponding heart’s ease to Wallace himself. For he was then young and inexperienced and I have no doubt that for many days previous he, too, had been quailing before that grim possibility, “What if she doesn’t like me!”

A number of the screen people were inspired with awe of Miss Farrar’s reputation. “I bet anything she’s up-stage,” several of them predicted before meeting her. That evening disarmed all such fears. So simple and friendly, so gay and unaffected, was the Metropolitan star that everybody went away singing her praises. I soon found, indeed, that the ancestry of the Irish seas had dowered her with more than that flowering vigour of look and manner. She has the warmth of personal approach, the ability to get along with folks of all descriptions, that characterise the Irish race.

This element in her character was brought out particularly in the studio. It was not long before everybody there, including “Grips” and “Props”—the local terms by which are designated respectively the electricians and the property men—were calling her “Jerry.” This intimacy of reference was a token of real affection and it was deserved, for she seldom passed the most humble worker in the studio without a smile or a friendly word.

When she arrived in Hollywood she didn’t know, of course, a single thing about making a film. “What,” she exclaimed on her first day, “why, I didn’t realize you had to make a single scene over four times.” This freshness of view-point placed her in a situation ideal for observation of the mental eagerness of which I have spoken. She asked questions of everybody in the studio from De Mille to “Grips.” It was wonderful to see the zest of her application to this new task, to watch that perfect implement of a brain cut and thresh and assort its selected subject.

There is no doubt about it. Geraldine Farrar enjoyed every minute of those first eight weeks spent in the movies. She loved the atmosphere of the motion-pictures. She liked the people in the cast. She told me she thought De Mille was great. I can hardly express what this wide area of satisfaction meant to me after eighteen months that had been instructive chiefly in the hardship of pleasing any star, at any given point.

So eager was Miss Farrar for her film day to begin that she used to arrive at the studio every morning at eight o’clock. She was then all made up for the set, and as this process is so much more exacting than the average woman’s dab of powder and rouge, one knew she had risen not later than six.

“H’m, where’s Mr. de Mille? Where’s everybody?” she used to ask.

Her manner was exactly that of a war-horse sniffing, “Here am I. Where’s the war?”

And when she began to work nothing seemed to tire her. At four o’clock in the afternoon, that hour when the average screen performer begins to wonder if she’ll melt before she takes root or take root before she melts, the great prima donna was as radiant with energy as she was at eight o’clock in the morning. The explanation of this sustained vitality lay deeper than her undoubted physical strength. She herself voiced it one day during her second engagement with the Lasky Company.

She was then making “Joan the Woman.” It was during the most intense heat of the California Summer. During this particular set she wore a suit of armor which must have been about as soothing to her feelings as wrist-warmers to a resident of Bombay. The set, which had been called for one hour, was not actually taken until more than four hours’ later. This wait, so characteristic of a studio day, was rendered more oppressive by the thud of adjacent carpentry work and by experimentation with the glaring electric lights.

While all this was going on a lady of the court of Charles VII. sat with her make-up box on her knee and from time to time dabbed with powder beads of perspiration rising above the surface of grease-paint. This manifestation of warmth was not unprovoked. For the lady wore a velvet dress with heavy trimming of fur and her head was engulfed in one of those gigantic coiffures prescribed for mediÆval times. No wonder that as she administered her powder she made sweet moan about the hardships of life on “the lot.”

“People that think this life’s easy,” she muttered at last, “let them try it on a July day—let them wait around for hours all tucked up in these hot-water bottles of clothes. Whew! Say, are they ever going to start shooting?”

“Cut out your grouching,” retorted a more stoical fellow sufferer, “look how Jerry’s taking it.”

“Jerry” presented, as a matter of fact, anything but a wilted appearance. She was talking, now to this person, now to that. Her eyes were sparkling, her white teeth flashed in a frequent smile. Piqued by such revelations of fortitude, the first lady of the court walked over to her.

“Won’t you tell me how you do it, Miss Farrar?” she asked. “Don’t you ever mind anything; the heat or the long waits or anything?”

“Jerry” threw back her head and laughed heartily. “Not a bit of it,” she answered, “I’m too much interested all the time to know what’s happening on the outside of me.”

It was during the production of this same play that some gentlemen of the court of Charles VII. availed themselves of a contemporary solace. A long shot had been taken of the French court and it had been taken, according to custom, four times. None of these occasions had revealed anything wrong and it was only when De Mille “saw the rushes”—the technical term describing a first view of the previous day’s shots—that he discovered an anachronism which would have made Sir Walter Scott’s offenses in this direction seem blameless.

“For Heaven’s sake,” he cried, “look at that! The gentlemen of the fourteenth century are chewing gum!”

Miss Farrar whooped with merriment over this historical discrepancy, and to-day the incident supplies her with a favorite motion-picture story. I may mention casually that this mistake is eloquent with the possibilities of waste involved in a single wrong performance of a single extra performer.

In this case we used up a thousand feet of film and the hundreds of dollars involved in wages, lights, and other expenses on a scene which, of course, had to be entirely remade.

The eminent singing actress often showed back of the screens that impulsive generosity which has endeared her to so many people. Once she did not like the gown worn by a certain extra. Neither did the extra.

Quick as a flash Miss Farrar sent her maid to her residence in Hollywood to obtain a costume from her own personal wardrobe. And when she put this raiment into the extra’s hand it was for keeps. She sometimes lent her fine jewels to people in the cast, and her frequent “small” gifts to those about her were what most of us would call large. Such donations were always performed with a certain splendour of gesture that made one think of a mediÆval prince taking off the gold chain around his neck to give to somebody who had chanced to say, “What a beautiful piece of jewelry you are wearing.”

If, indeed, Miss Farrar is a captain of industry, she belongs to that particular branch which flourished in the Florence of the fifteenth century.

While she was making “Maria Rosa” there befell Miss Farrar the great romantic adventure of which the world has heard so much. As a result of my interview with Mr. Lou Tellegen he was engaged by the Lasky Company to go to Hollywood during the Summer of 1915. He was not playing in Miss Farrar’s productions and it was not until after some days spent in California that the two met.

Mr. Fred Kley was responsible for the introduction. Here at this widely known figure of the film world I feel bound to pause for a few words of tribute. Kley, who now occupies an important position in the organization of the Famous Players-Lasky organization, had gone to California with Cecil de Mille. He it was who had selected the original site of the livery-stable, and after the Lasky Company moved there he had attended to a wide variety of details.

He kept books—often on the back of stray envelopes; he hired extra performers; he assembled properties, and when De Mille imported several rattlesnakes for the production of “The Squaw Man” it was he, I believe, who ministered to these pets. I am sure that Briareus with his hundred hands never accomplished more than did honest, faithful, Fred Kley with his limited equipment.

I shall give Mr. Kley’s own account of the introduction, for certainly nothing could be more vivid. “Mr. Tellegen happened to be with me one day,” he recounts, “when Miss Farrar, still in the Spanish costume she had been wearing in ‘Maria Rosa’ walked across the lot. ‘I want to meet Miss Farrar,’ said Mr. Tellegen, ‘Won’t you take me over?’ I did and I’ve never seen anything like it before nor since. It was just as if a spark came from his eyes and was met by one from hers.

“They began speaking in French right away,” adds he, “and of course I couldn’t understand. But, believe me, there’s a whole lot in a tone, and their tones gave them away as much as their eyes did. He walked across the lot with her, then to her dressing-room. And after that you’d see them together all the time just the minute they could get away from a set.”

In the light of this personal experience of Geraldine Farrar, that frequent question of hers “Who is to be my Don JosÉ” is invested with a strange, perverse, almost sinister, quality of destiny. It was not the Don JosÉ of her own life drama that she met in Lou Tellegen. It was the Toreador. When she came to California her heart, according to rumour, had not been untouched. But if this same rumour is to be credited further, it had never before been subjugated. Like the heroine of the drama and the opera with which she is so brilliantly identified, she had always retained her supremacy in love. Like this same Carmen, she surrendered at last, not to the most loving, but to the most conquering type.

The last memory of the beautiful Farrar’s first visit to Hollywood centers about the station from which pulled out her special train.

Tellegen had, of course, come down to see her off, and as the engine steamed away on its long eastern course the actor could be seen running along the platform beside the car from which his love still clung to his hand. For many yards he raced along and it was only a sudden acceleration of the engine that finally parted those reluctant hands.

A very different leave-taking from the one I shall record when several Summers afterwards Geraldine Farrar again came to Hollywood, this time to make pictures for the Goldwyn studio!