Long-Distance Runner

1.

Nothing is stranger in the history of popular culture than the fate of the silent film stars. Their day lasted less than twenty years, and when the break came, it was sharp, quick, and total—Hollywood was hit by a cataclysm, and most of its stars were extinguished almost overnight. There were survivors, of course: relative newcomers like Joan Crawford, Myrna Loy, William Powell, Ronald Colman, Norma Shearer, and Janet Gaynor, who made the transition easily. Garbo, an exception to every rule, took her time (or M-G-M took it) and emerged triumphantly in 1930 with Anna Christie; Chaplin simply went on as he began.

Of the older stars, only a few have survived as figures meaningful to us. There are the great comics—Keaton and Lloyd, as well as Chaplin. Valentino has become a byword, partly for his exotic sexuality, partly for his untimely death—the James Dean of his day. Gloria Swanson would have been forgotten if not for her remarkable comeback in Sunset Boulevard. Mary Pickford and her husband Douglas Fairbanks still register, she with her golden curls, he with his swashbuckle; not many people, though, realize that for fifteen years she was the most famous woman in the world. Lon Chaney: the man of a thousand faces—the Hunchback, the Phantom—but who’s seen his movies? The Talmadge sisters, John Gilbert, Blanche Sweet, Colleen Moore, Pola Negri (than whom no one was more legendary)—at best, they’re faint shadows on our radar screen.

And then there is Lillian Gish, who not only survived the death of the silents, going on to a sixty-year career in sound film, on stage, and on TV, but is considered by many the greatest of American actresses. How did this happen? She had been less popular by far—and less well paid, too—than her friend Pickford, than Swanson, than Norma Talmadge. She was reserved off-screen, cooperating with the usual puff journalism but pulling up her skirts at such gimmicks as allowing her image and autograph to appear on one of a set of silver-plated “Oneida Community” movie-star spoons. Her private life was so private that not even her close friends knew for certain whether she had been to bed with the great man of her life, D.W. Griffith, or with Charles Holland Duell Jr., a businessman who was at one time her manager (he sued her for breach of promise and a lot of other things—and lost—in a series of spectacular court cases), or with George Jean Nathan, the famously acerb critic, who for years was her “constant companion,” but whom she steadfastly refused to marry. Marriage? She never “found a name which I would rather carry into eternity than Lillian Gish.”

She was considered a great beauty, with her perfect oval face, pale complexion, and casque of blond hair that was highlighted and glorified by superb cinematographers as well as by photographers like Edward Steichen, but her beauty was childlike rather than glamorous. Although there was a sophisticate or two among her roles in Griffith two-reelers, and some lovely pastoral features like True Heart Susie, her image in the silents was remarkably consistent: Lillian Gish was virginal, true, and generally in peril—her near-rape by the mulatto villain of The Birth of a Nation is a characteristic Gish situation. (A journalist once said that “an optimist is a person who will go to the theater expecting to see a D.W. Griffith production in which Lillian Gish is not attacked by the villain in the fifth reel.”) In fact, through most of her Griffith career—from 1912 to 1921—she was essentially a heroine of melodrama; only in the extraordinary Broken Blossoms does she inhabit what can be called a tragedy.

Yet even while she was playing these somewhat mawkish roles—the seduced and abandoned Anna of Way Down East, turned out into the blizzard, fleeing across the ice floes; the about-to-be-violated-and/or-guillotined Henriette of Orphans of the Storm—her reputation as a serious artist grew. Her major post-Griffith silents were important events: The White Sister, Romola, La Bohème, The Scarlet Letter, and The Wind, although it took decades for that film, her last silent, to be recognized as a masterpiece. By the time in the late Twenties that she abandoned Hollywood, or it abandoned her, she had established herself as an extraordinary film tragedienne and a darling of New York intellectuals and writers.

Two things unrelated to her actual work helped to create and maintain her reputation. One was her longevity. It is now established that she was born in 1893—later dates were put forward throughout her life—and not only did she live until six months short of her hundredth birthday, but she worked almost ceaselessly from 1902, when she was nine and barnstorming across the country in melodramas like Her First False Step and East Lynne, to The Whales of August, the feature film she starred in with Bette Davis in 1986, when she was ninety-three. She didn’t need a comeback the way Swanson did because after The Birth of a Nation, made in 1915, she never went away.

What also helped secure her reputation was her association with Griffith. Famously, it was her slightly older friend “Little Mary” who made the introduction, in 1912. Pickford was far more ambitious for fame, money, and independence than was acceptable to Griffith, a benevolent dictator who distributed roles almost as favors among the crowd of eager young girls at his disposal, and she soon left him for greener pastures. Lillian and her sister, Dorothy, found themselves vying for plum Griffith roles (though not with each other: Dorothy was immediately typed as the comic, Lillian as serious). Almost from the start, Lil-lian devoted her heart and soul (and body?) to the Master but, more important, she devoted her mind to learning the business of making movies. Alone among the Griffith players, she watched rushes, learned about cameras and editing, made helpful suggestions about scripts; his trust in her was such that in 1920 he asked her to direct a film (starring Dorothy), an assignment she carried out with her customary thoroughness.

But what confirmed her connection with Griffith in the public mind was her lifelong proselytizing for his work. She called her autobiography, written in 1969, The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me, and it is heavily weighted toward her Griffith years, which even by then represented less than a sixth of her working life. She crisscrossed the country lecturing on his importance in film history; struggled to defend him against the charges of racism that greeted The Birth of a Nation; left a large trust fund to preserve his films; lobbied (successfully) for a Griffith stamp. Griffith’s movies, of course, stand on their own, but Gish’s unending efforts to perpetuate his name and reputation certainly worked in his favor. And in hers.

2.

That this was the result of deliberate policy on her part is the contention of a new biography, Lillian Gish: Her Legend, Her Life, by Charles Affron. The subtitle underlines a basic theme of his book. Although he scrupulously tracks the life—a welcome and valuable account, since previous Gish literature has been long on rapture and short on data—and pays sensitive homage to the art, it is attacking the legend that preoccupies him. Affron’s reading of Gish’s motives in promoting both Griffith and silent film is typical. “The cult of Griffith was, after all, the path to her own artistic apotheosis…. If his legacy were forgotten, she would lose her place in movie history.” (This is not only ungenerous but untrue—Gish’s great performances, both for Griffith and after, are more than enough to ensure her place in movie history.) “The Way Down East episode, like so many others involving Lillian, came to embody the myth of the birth of the movies and to place her at its center…. Lillian Gish devoted her life, public and private, to promoting the centrality of that position.”

Certainly, Lillian Gish, young and old, worked to establish a sympathetic public persona, and succeeded in doing so, along the way cooperating with some fairly stomach-turning publicity. One can share Affron’s distaste for such nonsense as a nine-part Liberty magazine interview from 1927, called “Lillian Gish, the Incomparable Being: The True Story of a Great Tragedienne.” And perhaps she encouraged journalists to refer to her as “the Madonna of the screen,” “the virgin queen of the screen,” “ethereal, aloof, and very beautiful—but hardly human.” On the other hand, it’s always been the business of stars to create legends about themselves, however inaccurate. Pickford presented herself as Little Mary long after she had proved herself one of the most astute businesswomen Hollywood has ever seen; Valentino—the Sheik—was a sweet, rather passive fellow, happiest when at home making pasta for his friends; “vamp” Theda Bara—“Kiss me, my fool!”—whose name was trumpeted as an anagram for “Arab death,” was in reality Theodosia Goodman, a nice Jewish girl from Cincinnati.

Bara, though, was too bad to be true, and nobody took her legend seriously. Gish was too good to be true, and Affron, taking her legend all too seriously, has suffered the disappointment romantics tend to suffer when they realize that their idealized one is not, after all, incomparable. He’s even critical of her for lying about her age (“As late as 1987, when she was ninety-four, she still indulged in the creative chronology that actors often think their prerogative”), as if all kinds of stars don’t claim this prerogative almost automatically—and sensibly. Griffith, everyone knew, liked very young girls. When Lillian arrived at Biograph, in 1912, did her integrity require her to inform him that she was already an elderly nineteen?

Affron is equally censorious in his take on the relationship between the sisters, who were temperamental opposites. Dorothy was a madcap with an open, happy nature and a great sense of fun. As she matured, that turned into normal enjoyment of boys, parties, drinking—everyone at Biograph knew that she and the appealing young actor Bobby Harron were in love, and what they were up to when they went off together. Nobody knew anything about Lillian—if there was anything to know. Interviewed by Richard Schickel for his excellent biography of Griffith,^* Anita Loos recalled that in the early Biograph days she was speculating with Dorothy

as to what, exactly, her sister and Griffith did when they walked out together. One night the two youngsters followed them in hopes of finding out. But the director and his leading lady were models of propriety; they dined in a restaurant and Griffith escorted Gish home at a seemly hour.

Lillian was to say over and over that Dorothy “got the happy side that God left out of me,” and “I never learned how to play.” (In 1970, she even tells an audience, “I’m as funny as a barrel of dead babies!”) In a pair of articles for Stage Magazine, written by the sisters in the Twenties, she says, “I envy this dear darling Dorothy with all my heart…. When she goes to a party, the party becomes a party; when I go to one, I’m afraid it often stops being a party. And I don’t like it. I want to be like she is.” Dorothy on Lillian:

How I envy her the singleness of purpose, the indefatigability, the unabating seriousness which have taken her straight to the heights and will carry her on and on! I never cease to wonder at my luck in having for my sister the woman who, more than any other in America, possesses all the qualities of true greatness.

Even given the wholesale hyperbolic ghostwriting that obviously took place here, these remarks must to some degree reflect what these two young women felt about themselves and each other.

Dorothy Gish was a talented and charming actress and, indeed, became a real star—both Lillian and Griffith insisted that she was the more naturally talented of the two girls. When she was eighty, Lillian was still saying of Dorothy, “She was the talent in the family. I didn’t have her gift for comedy.” Affron’s view is that “from the start of their careers to the end of her life, Lillian remained steadfast in putting forth the image of sisterly devotion, selflessness, and generosity” and “the image of untroubled sibling relationship was one of the constants in Lillian’s life story.” Was it only “image,” though? No doubt there were conflicts and abrasions between two such dissimilar sisters over seventy years of intense professional and personal relationship, but their interdependency and mutual affection are beyond question. Can one really discount Lillian’s frequent assertions that “Heaven was to me a place where I could be with Mother and Dorothy all the time?” This is not the language of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

3.

In almost bizarre contrast to Affron is Lillian Gish: A Life on Stage and Screen by Stuart Oderman, published a year ago. Oderman is the quintessential fan. In 1954 he was a stage-struck fourteen-year-old from Newark who cut school to attend Broadway matinees and found himself sitting next to Gish at a MOMA screening of Broken Blossoms. So began a friendship of thirty-nine years, the culminating moment of which takes place, many years later, when he is the pianist at a MOMA screening of The Wind. Typical of his feeling for her—and his style:

My fantasy had come true—my hope that one evening, I would be playing, and Miss Gish would be in the audience…. “Play well. I have always been proud of you.” …I quickly wiped away my tears with my tuxedoed right arm as I tremoloed with my left hand.

The value of Oderman’s book lies in the many rich interviews and conversations he held with Gish throughout the almost four decades of their friendship, questioning her, hoarding her words, and therefore able to give us a sense of the living woman. Even more informative, perhaps, are the interviews he conducted through the years with Lillian’s contemporaries and friends—with Constance Talmadge, Blanche Sweet, Colleen Moore, Anita Loos, Frank Capra, Louise Brooks, and many others. Their reminiscences may be distorted by the passage of time (or by affection, or malice), but they give us a crucial sense of how Gish was perceived by her coevals.

On the bedeviled subject of Lillian’s relationship with Griffith, for instance, Donald Crisp (who played her murderous father in Broken Blossoms) told Oderman: “He knew that the Gish girls would do anything he wanted. Especially Lillian. Lillian was in love with him.” Thinking back to The Birth of a Nation, Dorothy Reid, widow of the handsome star Wallace Reid, laughingly remarked, “If Lillian would have kissed anyone on the set, it would have been Mr. Griffith! If she could get away from her mother. And if Mr. Griffith could get away from his wife!” Lillian herself: “I suppose people in those days made all kinds of jokes about Mr. Griffith and his harem, but we didn’t pay attention to them. Mr. Griffith was the father we never had.” We can decide for ourselves if these are accurate reflections; what matters is the sense they convey of what life at Griffith’s Biograph felt like to these young people long before they had been canonized (or forgotten).

What was Lillian like? All the evidence points to the accuracy of her judgment of herself: that she was preternaturally serious, determined, single-minded. She had to be. When she refers to Griffith as the father she never had, she is touching lightly on what was the central fact of her youth. Her real father, James Leigh Gish, was an alcoholic who soon abandoned his wife and children. (The Pickfords and the Talmadges were fatherless, too.) It was then, in the 1890s, that through taking in theatrical boarders, the well-bred Mary Gish found herself—and later her little girls—on the stage; at first, the family back in Massillon, Ohio (President Zachary Taylor was an ancestor), had to be protected from this scandalous turn of events. When Lillian was six, Mr. Gish committed an unpardonable (and traumatic) act: his wife had entrusted him with the three dollars meant for the weekly installment payment on their shoddy furniture, and presumably he drank it away. The furniture was repossessed, and James Gish was more or less gone from their lives.

But Lillian thought of him with longing. And it was Lillian who at seventeen, doing her duty as always, traveled alone to Oklahoma, where he was gravely ill. She spent months there, attending school and visiting her father in his sanitarium. He was to die in 1912, cause of death: “Gen. paralysis of insane.” (Not only does Affron crow that “in one of her early biographical pieces, Lillian reported him as having died in Baltimore of pneumonia”—as if a famous young woman of that period was under an obligation to reveal the ghastly truth of her father’s death—but he assures us that “Lillian’s stay in Shawnee was a relatively happy time.”)

It was always their mother on whom Lillian and Dorothy counted—the rock of strength, the lodestar, the dispenser of all wisdom. And the wisdom Mrs. Gish dispensed, and that Lillian adhered to all her life, can be (and frequently was) expressed in two sentences. About her work when she was barnstorming as a child: “Speak loud and clear, or they’ll get another girl.” About men: “Your father destroyed me. Another man would destroy us.” Anita Loos put it clearly: “Lillian had two great fears: being abandoned the way her mother was, and being out of work.” Her entire life can be seen as a response to these two fears: apparently she never gave herself fully to a man, and for eighty years she made sure that she was never out of work for very long.

As she quickly became first a leading Griffith player, then a star, Gish’s discipline, her self-control, and her emotional distancing grew. She had assumed these qualities early. In her autobiography she relates that during a performance of her first play, In Convict Stripes—she was nine—a gun was accidentally discharged and she was hurt. The show, of course, went on, and afterward a doctor “used long needles to pry out the buckshot. It hurt badly, for he used no anesthesia. But I had already been trained to conceal my private feelings in public.” There are the famous stories of the physical hardships she ignored, such as those endured during the climactic blizzard scene in Way Down East: “At one time my face was caked with a crust of ice and snow, and icicles like little spikes formed on my eyelashes, making it difficult to keep my eyes open.”

Just as hardships were to be ignored, emotions were to be suppressed—the only strong feelings she acknowledges relate to her mother and sister. (“Our greatest fear was being taken away from mother.”) She may, early on, have been in love with Griffith, but her description of him in her autobiography has a Dreiserian clarity: “He always looked uncomfortable in a house—out of place, caged in. The only surroundings in which he seemed comfortable were the studio, a hotel dining room, a lobby.”

There had been adoring boyfriends back in Massillon, but Lillian showed little compunction about dropping them. Griffith she worshiped at first, but he was primarily mentor, father, boss. Charles Duell was a failed attempt at security: though born rich, he was not only incompetent but dishonest. And there was George Jean Nathan, who represented the world of intellect and culture. For years she was with him at opening nights, at parties, on trips to Europe. His circle—H.L. Mencken, the novelists Joseph Hergesheimer and James Branch Cabell (both of whom wrote novels about her), Eugene O’Neill (who said of her, “There’s a girl who has one of the smartest beans”), Condé Nast—was one she aspired to. But it turned out that Nathan, who claimed to have a Philadelphia Main Line, Episcopal background, had misrepresented himself. (Nathan’s political views were “slightly to the right of Marie Antoinette’s,” as indeed were Lillian’s—for years she was a highly vociferous and prominent America-Firster.) One day in 1937 he let slip the fact that his mother was in a hospital in Philadelphia—apparently, this was the first time Nathan had ever mentioned that his mother was alive. Lillian went to the hospital and “before the drama critic’s mother could complete her first sentence, Lillian immediately knew that George could never have been the son of Main Line Philadelphia Episcopalians.” Responding to a direct question, George’s sister-in-law said, “If George’s brother is Jewish, I suppose George would be, too!” Lillian broke with Nathan—not, Ruth Gordon testifies, because he proved to be Jewish, but because he had lied.

When the break occurred, Lillian was forty-four, and as far as is known, there was never another man in her life. Which would not have come as a surprise to flapper star Colleen Moore, who remarked to Oderman, “How could Lillian play a love scene convincingly when she never had one in real life?… Her sister liked the men, but Lillian had all of that repressed emotion…. Suffering is easy. Loving is harder.” What she played with consummate genius was frigidity. The scene in The Wind when her new husband attempts to caress her is so disturbingly convincing in the revulsion she manifests that it’s very hard not to make the leap from actress to woman.

In an uncharacteristic moment of self-analysis about her later Griffith years, Lillian wrote, in an unpublished memoir, “At the time, I hadn’t enough insight to know that I was using hard work as a smoke screen to cover my almost complete retreat from life…. There was a curious gap between emotional conflicts I portrayed in motion pictures and those presumably suffered by the men and women whom I knew. Or my own life problems, for that matter.” True to form, Affron dismisses the authenticity of these feelings.

4.

Where Affron is on firm ground is in his appreciation of Gish’s artistry. He had already, in 1977, anatomized her work, film by film, in a book called Star Acting: Gish, Garbo, Davis: “Melodrama is by definition excessive. Gish nourishes it with something that approaches religious fervor, and an ability to arrange her features in configurations so extreme, so lucid, so open that authenticity is extracted from the patently bathetic.” He has identified the quality that sets her apart from almost every other screen actor: her refusal—or inability—at crucial moments to hold anything in reserve.

This quality illuminates the most famous scenes of her silent film career. There is the terrifying climax of Broken Blossoms when she is battered to death by her father. (“When we filmed it,” she wrote, “I played the scene with complete lack of restraint, turning around and around like a tortured animal. When I finished there was a hush in the studio. Mr. Griffith finally whispered, ‘My God, why didn’t you warn me you were going to do that?'”) There is the emotional climax of Orphans of the Storm, when she hears the voice of her long-lost, blind sister (played by Dorothy) and cannot reach her. There is the harrowing sequence in The Wind when, maddened by the relentless wind itself and terrified by the man who has attacked her, she shoots and kills him. In such moments, as Affron suggests, melodrama is transcended by feeling heightened to unbearable limits without any loss of emotional truth.

Her contemporaries knew how special she was. Eva Le Gallienne, hardly a sentimentalist, wrote to her after seeing Romola, “The joy that you give me is a poignant and throbbing thing that makes me want to go down on my knees and pray.” But the praise that must have meant the most came from America’s most admired actor, John Barrymore, in a letter to Griffith about Way Down East:

Her performance seems to me to be the most superlatively exquisite and poignantly enchaining thing I have ever seen in my life. I remember seeing Duse in this country many years ago…—also Madame Bernhardt—and…it is great fun and a great stimulant to see an American artist equal if not surpass, the finest traditions of the theater.

Affron’s generous response to Gish’s art is, of necessity, more focused on her film work than on her work in the theater, of which he can have seen relatively little. But theater was where she was to place most of her energies from the early Thirties on. Unlike the other silent stars, Gish had a beachhead in New York, and quickly she was triumphing in Uncle Vanya. From there it was a succession of triumphs (most notably, Ophelia—she was forty-three—to John Gielgud’s Hamlet) and failures. She played Camille in Central City, Colorado (“Even the ushers wept”). She played Life with Father in Chicago for more than a year. She was a fixture on radio. She did Arsenic and Old Lace on television with Helen Hayes. In 1947, she played opposite Gielgud in Crime and Punishment. (It was the first time I saw her on stage—I barely knew who she was—and I was transfixed by her emotional power.) And she was back in the movies, playing character parts and old women. Her death scene in Duel in the Sun has the old power. Her unshakable resolve in holding off Robert Mitchum with a rifle in The Night of the Hunter is justly famous. (Mitchum said of her, “One of the toughest women I ever met. Why do you think she lasted so long?”)

In 1965, she played the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet at the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut. The Juliet was my not-yet wife, Maria Tucci. Gish’s performance was sly and loving, not bawdy—bawdy was certainly not her métier. Her behavior was impeccably professional—always on time, no demands, no star turn; her only quiet complaint was that she couldn’t understand rehearsing on Sunday mornings: “When do the actors go to church?” She was also extraordinarily generous. In rehearsal she gently adjusted one of their embraces so that it was Maria who was facing the audience: “They’re here to see Juliet, dear, not the Nurse.” She loved to repeat what her pal Gielgud said when he came to see her in the show: “You were wonderful, darling—as Mary Poppins, not as the Nurse, but wonderful.” And she absolutely insisted that Maria procure a Pierce’s Slanting Board; from 1940 on, Affron tells us, Gish lay on one of these upside down every morning, starting at seven. “Time is your friend; you get wiser,” she was to say. “But gravity is your enemy. It sucks you into your grave.”

In the early Eighties, I had the opportunity to discuss with Gish the knotty theories Louise Brooks had put forward about her, Garbo, and M-G-M. Lillian had no more and no less to say than she had said in dozens of public statements. Fair enough, but there was something steely (a word often applied to her) in her guardedness: she had decided on her version of the past, and no other version was discussable. This stubbornness, which she frequently deployed in the face of the evidence, is a quality of hers that particularly offends Affron. Yet most of her inaccuracies are too small to matter, or are clearly the result of lapsed memory. On one major issue, though, she definitely distorted the truth: her contention that after The Wind was completed, M-G-M forced her to tack on a happy ending. By examining the various dated scripts, Affron demonstrates that the ending we know—Lillian and Lars Hanson standing in the doorway of their shack, facing the wind and the future together—was always intended. Clearly, Gish felt that if she had to retreat from Hollywood, it would look better if she could lay the blame on the crassness of studio moguls rather than on her diminishing box-office appeal.

5.

Much as Affron disapproves of what he sees as Gish’s mendacity and self-glorification, he is positively worshipful compared to a disgusting 1978 novel called Vanessa, written by Ann Pinchot, who had been Gish’s collaborator on the autobiography. Vanessa begins with the barely disguised Griffith character, Joshua Fodor, deflowering the even less disguised Lillian character, Vanessa, in a hotel bedroom, and it never looks back. Here she is seducing her sister Cassie’s (Dorothy’s) young boyfriend, Richie:

My most intimate parts were moist with excitement and desire…. I responded as Mr. Fodor had taught me so ingeniously, with my mouth, my lips, my tongue on his strong handsome penis, playing, teasing, kissing it until it gushed with a magnificent spurt into my mouth.

Richie promptly blows his brains out. This would be merely ludicrous if “Richie” didn’t seem to be modeled on the much-loved Bobby Harron, the young actor whom Dorothy had cared for and who in 1920 died of a gunshot wound, possibly a suicide. His death devastated the entire Biograph family, and in particular the Gishes—it was Lillian who had to break the news to Bobby’s mother. For Pinchot even to suggest that Lillian might have been responsible for Harron’s death seems an astounding piece of cruelty to a woman in her eighties. But Vanessa is so filled with resentment that it leads one to speculate what Gish can possibly have done to her collaborator to so alienate her. (Of course, we’ve been asking ourselves that question about Othello and Iago for four hundred years.)

Perhaps it was Gish’s unassailable reserve that provoked Pinchot—all that rigor and independence doesn’t leave much room for an acolyte. Oderman tells us that in 1975—Gish was eighty-two—he was watching her in her dressing room “raising and lowering her heavy Russian costume and concentrating on a hook on the wall.” “I can hang that up for you,” he says. Lillian shakes her head and whispers, “Ssh!” After three more attempts she lunges forward and gets the costume on the hook. “You’re not here every night,” she tells him, “and if you were, I would become dependent on you. That’s not good, to be dependent on anybody…. If I became dependent on other people, I’d lose my will to live.”

Besides, who was there to depend on? Her father had abandoned her, Griffith had been unreliable, her mother and sister had died. Men? Colleen Moore explained that the reason every man in Hollywood was after Gish rather than the latest sex bomb was that she was unobtainable. Children? Hardly. Her life was her work. As she said to Stuart Oderman in 1954, the year they met, “It isn’t easy being a Lillian Gish.”