The Argosy, April 1916 — page 81: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE “This was a Chinese gong, about a yard in diameter. A couple of carpenters rolled it up to where Jim sat. He hit it a blow and it let out a roar like a lion. After that he gave all his signals with it and all his criticisms. “One bang meant to stop the action; two to start over again, and the long roll, which sounded like election night on Broadway, meant that the business was rotten. “It was on the second gong day that Lollie threw the rock at Jim. 1 think she’d have chucked the job right then, but it seems that her lawyer had warned her to stick it out. “We had a pretty big studio by that time. Some days we were working as many as five companies at once. And it got so that we had to put up notices in all the dressing-rooms that any one stopping work or running to see what it was about when that gong sounded would be fined. “Everybody connected with the Da- guerre knew all about Jim and Lollie by now, and there wasn’t one of them who Lollie hadn’t insulted in some way or other. If we’d have let them, they’d have been there all day—Jim sitting there in the throne-chair tapping on the gong, while Lol- lie tore her hair and called him names. ‘“Arnitz himself was there two or three times. “ “How do you think it’s coming out?’ he asked. “ ‘Great,’ I told him. “ “But she can go into court,’ he said, ‘and show how much work she’s done, and the chances are that we'll have to come across with half of that eighty thousand, if not all of it.’ “To tell the truth, I have been worried about that part of the deal myself. Several times I had broached the matter to Jim. ‘I'll fix her,’ he’d say, and that was all I could get out of him. “T went it blind. I said to Arnitz: ‘You leave it to Jim, he'll fix her.’ Arnitz was game. Besides, Jim had become his only hope as well as mine. , “Shall I confess it? I believe that se- cretly I was hoping that Lollie would get sick—or something like that. though! 3 “T had found out a lot about her. She had a father still working somewhere in a boiler factory. His name was Snugger, or Smugger—I forget which. Her mother still took in washing over in the old home- “SMUGGLER’S DAUGHTER ”—FIVE REELS. No danger, 71 flat on Eleventh Avenue, where Lollie had been brought up to the music of the freight trains. “The funny part of it is that Jim never protested. He took everything that she handed him and never made a chirp. But he was like a bulldog. That was the nature of him. He never let up in a scrap. That was why I had been so sure of him. ‘‘And something else. I could see that, in spite of all her display of cussedness and temper, he was getting some sort of a hold over Lollie. I couldn’t understand it. But there are so many things that a director never understands where the women of his company are concerned that this phase of the question scarcely came into my mind until a little later on. “At any rate, Jim was using his gong less and less. “One day Jim came to me and proposed that we go out on location. In this picture, that meant over to the Jersey shore under the Palisades. It was a location that Jim and I had picked out the Sunday before. “That, by the way, is a part of the di- rector’s work that the fans seldom think about. They see some ‘beloved idol of the silent drama’ take a tumble over a cliff. They don’t stop to remember that Mr. Idol has a safe and solid stirrup of leather and piano wire around his ankle to hold him safe, and that long before he took the fall some lonely director poked around that cliff to get the location and then went through the act himself three or four times to show how it ought to be done. ‘“T did have hopes of this scene. The camera was to be placed well up on a shelf of the cliff which had to be reached by a rope and ladder. From there we could shoot the river bank down below with a telescopic lens. “T had it figured out that even the un- speakable Lollie would be presentable at that distance. All that she had to do, more- Over, was to ‘walk through’ a few times dressed in a sort of nightgown and gazing pensively up at the sea-gulls. ‘It’s a fine day,’ said Jim. ‘Better get this exterior filmed while it’s clear. We'll take care of the interiors later on when the little lady has more confidence.’ | “T looked at him with a smile. That ‘little-lady’ stuff where Lollie Goodelle was concerned was some joke, ‘We arranged our schedule. Lollie had a limousine that somebody had given her. 1OOOLK C@