Here are some of my favorite mentions of Lillian among Hedda Hopper's columns.
June 4, 1960. "Lillian Gish thinks actors should be giving producers pensions. "Most of those I've known died broke but we're still eating."
January 27, 1959. "When director John Houston, in Durango, Mexico, asked Lillian Gish how she happened to learn to shoot a gun, she replied, " Why, Al Jenkins, the reformed Oklahoma outlaw, taught me when he made pictures with us in the old days."
April 26, 1958. "Herb Sterne reports he's taken a house in Majorca where he gets a maid for $10 a month. She also does laundry and mending. He's named his villa, "Way Down East" after his favorite movie with Lillian Gish and D. W. Griffith."
April 1, 1958. "Lillian Gish leaves for New Orleans, the city of my dreams, in a few weeks to direct "The Beggar's Opera." When asked to do it she protested: "I've never directed before, but if you have that kind of confidence, I'll accept." In August she and sister Dorothy start rehearsals for "The Children's Play" which is an adaptation by Richard Wilbur from he French." (Jim Note: Lillian directed Dorothy in a silent film. Her comment about the New Orleans opera must have been meant as she had never directed an opera.)
September 13, 1957. "Lillian Gish plays Tennessee Williams' "Portrait of a Madonna" at the Berlin Film Festival September 20. He wrote and directed the one-act play for her sometime ago but her mother was ill at the time and she was unable to do it. Then he expanded it into "Streetcar Named Desire."
September 25, 1957 "Lillian Gish opened at Congress Hall in Berlin in two of Thornton Wilder's one-act plays, also "Portrait of a Madonna" by Tennessee Williams. Lillian was by way of being sensational and Wilder is bring her to Broadway for a Christmas engagement."
August 19, 1965. "The place to see celebrities. Tip to tourists: If you want to see celebrities goo to the Sportsmen's Lodge in the Valley. Lillian Gish is there ..."
August 10, 1965, "Lillian Gish - the youngest old timer. (Black and white photo of Lillian) "Lillian Gish can match careers with anybody and be way ahead. She began acting at age 5; did her first picture around 1910." (Actually, Hedda it was 1912.) This is a 648-word, 18-paragraph column solely on Lillian.
It opens with her excitement on performing in a musical "Anya," directed by George Abbott.
"Lillian subscribes to Christopher Morley's formula that a happy life is spent in learning, earning and yearning. "I'm still going to school learning about acting and how to live properly. The world and the people in it are my school. As a child I wanted to be in a musical comedy and the cuircus. I haven't made the big tent, but you see I am finally in a musical."
"her fragile-looking exterior covers lots of strength. They used to call her the Iron Horse." (Actually, Hedda it was "Iron Butterfly.")
August 2, 1965, "Love the title of Lillian Gish's next film. 'Follow Me, Boys.' They've been doing it for years."
In total, Hedda Hopper, an occasional actress, made about 100 mentions of Lillian Gish until her column ended in 1965.
Photoplay Magazine, 1922, page 40, Great Thoughts of the Month (from film stars). Of the 25 "great thoughts" Lillian Gish said, " I should like to do all the classics ... I think my appeal is largely to the more intellectual element."
Also quoted is Carol Dempster, a Griffith "star" of "America" who had limited success. She said, "Mr. Griffith is so wonderful." Really!
By The Way ... with Bill Henry, LA Times. 1/28/1950, "Funny thing about Lillian Gish, how she made a career out of being in trouble. She has been, all her acting life, the embodiment of of threatened womanhood. She was slender, pathetic, worried and made a business of playing 'Hearts and Flowers' on your heartstrings. If some big nasty brute didn't have designs on her, then it was a wicked banker trying to foreclose a mortgage, or a horrid parent ill-treating her. Lil's acting ability was such as to bring breathless claims that she was the Duse of the screen. She turned out to be built of wiry material, for she fought off those beasts in human form and triumphed even over the unfriendly elements as well, and still is, at last reports, facing up to new histrionic disasters confident that sine none has ever overwhelmed her, none eer will."
Adela Rogers t. Johns, American Weekly, 10/8/1950. Lillian Gish Braved Death to Make "Way Down East." The cameras of Way Down East were right on top of her, her little face grew blue, her lashes were icicles. When she was half-conscious from the wind and the snow, they would carry her back to the studio.
"There was danger, too," Richard Barthlemess, her co-star once told me. "They had dynamited the cie and I carried her back, stepping from cake to cake. I was scared silly. But Lillian was superhuman. She lived in the spirit. There was never any other woman like her."
"After the picture was released, Miss Gish got a letter she still cherishes. "It was a revelation to see the little girl who was with me only a few years ago moving with perfect acting," It was signed by David Belasco."
"The smile of the Gish girl is a bit of happiness trembling on the bed of death; the tears of the Gish girl are the tears Strauss wrote into the rosemary of his waltzes. The secret of this young woman's unparalleled acting rests in her carefully devised and skillfully negotiated technique of playing always behind a veil of silver chiffon." George Jean Nathan. New York Journal American.
Only Human by Sidney Fields, undated column, 1950. "The applause for Lillian Gish has been constant through the years. Hundreds of millions of people have seen her art and her beauty all over the world in early movie classics like "The Birth of a Nation," "Orphans of the Storm," "The White Sister"; in more recent films like "Duel in the Sun," and "Portrait of Jennie"; in countless plays from "Hamlet" to "Life with Father."
"A few weeks ago Lillian Gish had a birthday. She will never age. When the years were young, men grew lyrical over her beauty like the fragrant April Moon of men's hopes and her tears were the tears Johann Strauss wrote in the Rosemary of his waltzes."
"The years have added to her gentle beauty. They have added a loveliness that comes with tears and many April moons. Growing wise, she has grown more lovely."
Jim Patterson, Editor
www.LDGish.blogspot.com
The Monkey Bar, where waiters and customers swap insults. At left, Dorothy and Lillian Gish, Gertrue Niesen (standing), Tables, right, Helen hayes, Charles MacArthur, Ben Hecht (rear); Louis Calhern, Tallulah Bankhead, Joe Dimaggio, Paul Douglas (foreground). Collier's November 25, 1950.
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