While I was still with the Lasky Company I had been attracted by the reputation of Mary Garden, the most consummate of “singing actresses” (I borrow the phrase from that famous musical critic, H.T. Parker of Boston), and at the beginning of the War I wired our London representative to see her. She was then in Scotland, where she was connected with a hospital for war-relief, and all efforts of our organisation to interest her in pictures failed absolutely. She refused to leave her humanitarian work. When, however, two or three years after this she came to America to sing in opera, I was prompt to get in touch with her.

My first talk with the celebrated artiste was at her apartment at the Ritz. As she swept in upon me I remember thinking that she looked even taller than she does on the stage. With her clear blue eyes and her finely modelled features and her heroic mould, a real Valkyr! Not for one moment did she suggest any of those rÔles to which her exquisite art lends itself. Thais, Melisande, Louise, Le Jongleur—I thought of these and was bewildered. I had never realised before how completely the mind can transpose the entire meaning of a face.

Here in her apartment away from the footlights Miss Garden’s countenance expressed a keen intelligence directed toward the problems of the day. For a long time we talked about the War, and I was amazed at her grasp of every industrial and economic phase of the conflict. Her wide range of information, together with the vivid, forceful phrases in which she expressed it—these made it hard for me to realise that I was really talking to a prima donna, she who even in her business transactions is supposed to distil an atmosphere of feminine romance and caprice. If I had heard Miss Garden that evening without knowing who it was I should have thought I was listening to some keen-witted, able woman journalist.

So engrossed were we both in the impersonal that it was at least an hour before I attacked the real purpose of my call. When I finally broached the subjects of pictures I told her, of course, how eager the Goldwyn Company was for the honour of first presenting her on the screen. She responded to this tribute very graciously. There was quite evidently not one moment’s doubt on her part that she could do pictures. Her only misgiving, frankly revealed, was that I might not pay her enough to justify her in making them.

I must say that for some time I, too, shared this misgiving. For the sum on which she stood firm was a hundred and fifty thousand dollars for ten weeks’ work.

However, a discussion of the matter with my associates, Edgar Selwyn, Arthur Hopkins, and Margaret Mayo, brought out the fact that they were all in favour of engaging her even at that sum. I took their advice, and, triumphantly conscious that I was taking Miss Garden from the numerous other film-producers who had been competing for her services, I signed my name to the enormous contract. The news that Mary Garden was at last to appear in pictures created a sensation throughout the country and, as the newspapers carried the story in big type, the Goldwyn Company profited by an enviable publicity. Seeing the importance attached to her appearance, I grew more and more hopeful that in the celebrated operatic star I was going to offset the various hardships attending my foundation of the Goldwyn Company.

Naturally it was “Thais,” the most widely known of her operatic rÔles, which suggested itself as her first vehicle. This story, although uncopyrighted in America, obligated the purchase of foreign rights, and I paid M. Anatole France, its author, ten thousand dollars for these. In so doing I felt sure that the French exhibitors alone would more than return my expenditure. Just how little this belief was realised is brought out by the conclusion of this episode.

No sooner had the actual production of “Thais” begun than I was beset by grave fears. Miss Garden, feeling rightfully that her operatic presentation of the rÔle was authoritative, did not recognise the difference of medium involved, and her first days on the set showed her, as the studio people expressed it, “acting all over the place.” That which was art in opera was not art on the screen, where the secret of achievement is emotional restraint. Watch Charlie Chaplin, the great exponent of motion-picture art, and you will see that he gets his effects by suggesting rather than by presenting an emotion.

Those days when we were producing “Thais” remain with me as among the most troubled of my history. Harassed by financial adjustments and by production difficulties, assailed by complaints of scenarios and directors from my various stars, I now had this supreme anxiety regarding the outcome of my enormous investment in Mary Garden. Indeed, I was constantly called upon to mediate between the singer and her director.

The death of “Thais” was almost the death of Mary Garden. She had fought bitterly the scenario’s departure from the original text here in this scene. She asserted that the screen version, presenting as it did the triumph of Thais, the woman, over Thais, the saint, was an intolerable falsification. And she could, indeed, hardly be persuaded to act in it at all.

When she saw the rushes of this scene, which so violated her artistic conception, her rage and grief knew no bounds. “I knew it!” she cried. “Oh, I knew it! Imagine me, the great Thais, dying like an acrobat!”

A moment later she rushed from the projection-room down to the office. Here she found Margaret Mayo. “Did you see it,” she stormed to this other woman. “That terrible thing? Did you see the way they made me die? Imagine a saint dying like that!”

The actress looked her up and down and then she responded in a tone of studied insolence, “You would have a hard time, Miss Garden, proving to any one that you were a saint.”

Some time later when I came up on the set I found Miss Garden weeping hysterically. “Oh,” said she, “that terrible woman! Have you heard what she just said to me.”

Miss Garden never forgave this gratuitous insult.

At last, after such stormy sessions, “Thais” was completed. The finished picture was not reassuring. But, even though I recognised its shortcomings, I still hoped that Mary Garden’s name would carry the production to triumph. If it went over it meant a lift from the deep trough of the sea in which the Goldwyn Company had been weltering. If it failed—but I did not dare allow myself to dwell upon this.

With the full sense of that evening’s significance, I went to the opening of “Thais” at the Strand Theatre in New York. A woman friend of mine went with me and as we walked out of the theatre her face told me everything. “Oh,” she said, her eyes filling with tears, “I just hate to tell you—knowing how much it means to you—but—well, you can see for yourself how they took it.”

I had indeed seen it—the heart-breaking coldness with which that first New York audience had received the picture on which I had staked so much. Even then, however, I did not realise the enormity of the failure. I did this only when a day or so later telegrams began pouring in from cities all over the country where “Thais” had appeared simultaneously with New York. These telegrams rendered, with few exceptions, the same verdict as the metropolis. Nor were foreign countries more enthusiastic.

Miss Garden herself was quite as overwhelmed by this failure as was the company. It had certainly been through no lack of diligence on her part that the story went as it did, for she had arrived at the studio early each morning and was often the last to leave it.

Certainly we were most unwise in selecting for her first picture a story in which her operatic tradition was so ingrained. This was brought out by the comparative success of her second film, “The Splendid Sinner.” Had this only been produced first we should have done on it three or four times the business which we actually did. As it was, “Thais” had been such a complete “flop” that exhibitors had their fingers crossed when it came to Mary Garden.

The Garden experience cost the Goldwyn Company heavily. Disastrous as it was, however, it did not compare with the two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar contract which the Famous Players-Lasky organization made with the late Caruso. I was at Graumann’s Theatre in Los Angeles when the first of the two pictures involved in this contract was released, and its reception was even more virulent than that accorded “Thais.” After playing two days it was, in fact, hissed off the stage. What was more, this experience was echoed all over the country. Nor was a rival’s venture with the beautiful Lina Cavalieri more productive of confidence in the wisdom of transplanting the operatic star to the screen firmament.

Aside from the unfamiliarity of the stage and operatic star with the medium of motion-pictures, a difficulty enhanced by the arrogance with which they usually approach the new field, there is another fundamental obstruction in the path of the film-producer who exploits them. Although their names may be on the lips of every inhabitant of a large city, many a small town knows them not. Main Street, which counts enormously in pictures, is apt to be much more familiar with some comparatively obscure film actress than with Farrar or Garden. This fact was brought home to me when, some months after signing my contract with Miss Garden, I was talking with a small-town exhibitor who had come with his lawyer to see me about signing a contract for Goldwyn films.

“Ah,” remarked the lawyer, looking at some photographs on my desk, “I see you have engaged Mary Garden. That ought to be a great card.”

“Mary Garden!” exclaimed the exhibitor at this point. “Why, what’s new about her. I showed her five years ago and charged five cents admission.” Evidently he had confused the prima donna with Mary Gardner, a screen actress.

One of the incidents which stands out from that Winter in the Fort Lee studio was the meeting which I effected between Mary Garden and Geraldine Farrar. The two rivals had never been introduced. But neither apparently had found acquaintance necessary to the formation of a firm opinion. In the days when Miss Farrar used to be working in the Lasky studio I would sometimes talk to her while De Mille was taking other scenes. The conversation usually drifted toward people, and its current bore us almost inevitably to Mary Garden. It was quite patent, however, that the fascination which this theme seemed to possess for Geraldine was that of professional rivalry, which always exists, and the greater the prima donnas the more vehement the feeling.

When I came to meet Miss Garden I found the sentiment strikingly reciprocal. Yet on that famous day when I brought Miss Farrar over to the Fort Lee studio to meet her rival I wish that the world might have shared with me the effusiveness of that greeting. Never were two women more glad to see each other. The affectionate cadences of their voices, the profound appreciation of the privilege of this moment expressed by each—these ended at last in a farewell kiss. But the kiss, I discovered later, had worked no psychological change. Both felt exactly the same after the meeting as they had before.

My experience with Miss Garden was costly. It was not, however, so ill-fated as was the Goldwyn Company’s engagement of Maxine Elliott.

With this episode I shall begin my next chapter and shall follow it with the story of Pauline Frederick, the Goldwyn Company’s engagement of Geraldine Farrar, and with my memories of Charlie Chaplin.