How starved they were for books! They would drop into a book shop for one, and come out with an armful. Before they knew it, they were acquiring a library. Life was becoming worth while. Lillian to Nell: “The world unfolds itself to me more and more every day, and sometimes it seems so bright; then it changes ...”
For the most part she thought herself very well off—in a world where no one is more than passably happy—and increasingly devoted herself to her work.
She began to train her facial muscles to obey her, to reflect her thoughts. “You must think inside,” she had told the reporter, by which she meant, I suppose, that one must do one’s own thinking, rather than merely reflect the thought of the director, must persuade one’s muscles—all of one’s muscles and members—unconsciously to obey the inward thought. “Think inside and your trained body will take care of itself,” might have been her creed. Not all players could adopt it. Some could hardly be said to think at all. Thought, the director’s thought, filtered through them. Griffith found her always willing—eager—to listen—but not pliable.... More and more he left her alone. Lately he said—to the writer:
“Dorothy was more apt at getting the director’s idea than Lillian, quicker to follow it, more easily satisfied with the result. Lillian conceived an ideal, and patiently sought to realize it. Genius is like that: the ideal becomes real to it.”
From his lofty hotel window, David Wark Griffith looked out across the tops of Babylon. Reflectively, he added:
“She is the best actress in New York—the best I know. She has the most brains. Joseph Medill Patterson once said to me: ‘Lillian Gish has the best mind of any woman I ever met.’ But I knew that, already.”
I want you to see “A Mothering Heart” ... I cried and lost so much sleep over that picture, that I am sure you would like it.
When the picture was an important one, she rehearsed the whole night, sometimes, alone in her room, going over the scenes again and again. She never required “glycerine tears”—she lived the part too vividly. A good many years later, she wrote:
“The first important picture in which I appeared was ‘The Mothering Heart.’ This was noteworthy, not only because it was in two reels, but because the vast sum of eighteen hundred dollars had been spent in the making.”