Flickers of Desire: Movie Stars of the 1910s

Chapter 3 Lillian Gish: Clean, and White, and Pure as the Lily

69 ★★★★★★★★★★ ✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩ 3 Lillian Gish Clean, and White, and Pure as the Lily KRISTEN HATCH In the summer of 1912, eighteen-year-old Lillian Gish wrote to her friend, Nell Becker: “We are going . . . to New York in a few weeks as mother has rooms engaged. I don’t know what we are going to do when we get there. Dorothy [Lillian’s younger sister] wants to pose for moving pictures, so watch the billboards” (Gish, letter to Nell Becker, undated, 1912).1 Once the family reached New York, Lillian and Dorothy renewed their acquaintance with an old friend, Mary Pickford, whom they had met years earlier during their childhoods as itinerant stage actors. Pickford offered them an introduction to her director, D. W. Griffith, and later that summer the sisters starred in their first film, An Unseen Enemy (1912). Lillian Gish, “The Lily Maid of the Cinema,” 1919. Despite the fact that she appeared in over thirty films in 1912 and 1913, Gish did not become a star through her work with the Biograph Company, which was the last of the film production companies to publicize its performers . Although fans wrote to Motion Picture Story Magazine clamoring to know the names of the actors who appeared in such films as The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912) and The Lady and the Mouse (1913), both of which featured Gish, the magazine’s “Answer Man” sternly scolded readers that questions about Biograph players would remain unanswered in accordance with the company’s policy of keeping its actors anonymous. However, in May 1913, the same magazine announced the “joyful news” that Biograph had finally relented and agreed to share personal information about the actors who appeared in Biograph films (“Greenroom Jottings,” May 1913, 166). The next month, Motion Picture readers were informed that Dorothy and Lillian Gish had starred in An Unseen Enemy, and in July, Lillian’s photograph appeared in the magazine’s Gallery of Picture Players, followed by Dorothy’s appearance there in the August issue. After Gish left Biograph for the Mutual Film Company in 1913, she began to appear more prominently in film publicity. In August 1914 she was featured in an article in Motion Picture Magazine, and in December of that year she and Dorothy both appeared on the cover of Photoplay. However, it was not until the release of The Birth of a Nation in 1915 that Gish began to gain widespread recognition. Some journalists erroneously described this as her first film, though most remembered her as having been among the Biograph “pioneers.” Readers of Motion Picture Magazine voted her performance in Birth as one of the year’s best, though she ranked far behind Mae Marsh, whose performance in the same film received much more acclaim. While Griffith devoted himself to directing the epic Intolerance (1916), in which she would play a small but pivotal role as the Eternal Mother, Gish appeared in a number of feature-length films that demonstrated her range as a performer. In Daphne and the Pirate (1916), for instance, she was a plucky French girl who manages to fight off the band of pirates that has kidnapped her en route to New Orleans, while in Sold for Marriage (1916), she played a Russian immigrant nearly forced into marriage with an older, wealthy man. By 1917, Griffith’s leading actresses—Mary Pickford, Blanche Sweet, and Mae Marsh—had signed lucrative contracts with other production companies. However, Gish remained with Griffith for the remainder of the decade, assuming the ingénue roles that once would have gone to her more famous co-stars. In 1918, with her appearance in Griffith’s Hearts of the World (1918), Gish emerged as a fully established star. That year she appeared in a Liberty Loan appeal directed by Griffith, as well as two other 70 KRISTEN HATCH Griffith films, The Great Love (1918) and The Greatest Thing in Life (1918). That year, her salary tripled, from $500 to $1,500 a week, and in 1919 her performances in Broken Blossoms and True Heart Susie secured her position as one of the screen’s leading tragediennes (Affron 117). Despite this critical success, Gish’s future was uncertain. She wrote to Nell Becker: “I . . . don’t know what I am going to do next. This business is LILLIAN GISH 71 Lillian Gish graces the cover of Photoplay Magazine, November 1919...