Jim Patterson wishes Happy Birthday to Lillian Gish

Lillian Gish birthday 2014. Left top corner, avec Letty. Right top corner, Gish by Hirschfeld.
Lower left, avec Sarah on Cliff Island. Lower right, avec Spike Lee, Gish Prize winner 2013.

Never to Look Back

Never to look back, Dear Lillian? It is neither just nor right!

Look back into your yesterday so wondrous and so bright!

To do again, in fancy, the things you have done.

To Feel again the warmth of the glory you have won!

Remember the Joy of being worthy, of all homage paid to you.

Look back into yesterday, fair lady, it is the thing to do!

The happiness you earned, in the days now gone by,

Is part of the sunshine, you see today in the sky!

The happiness in your life today is perhaps a generous share –

Your yesterdays decreed, that today it would be there!

It was your yesterdays, that gave you happiness, worth clinging to today.

'Tis well to face back to yesterday – from the past shy not away!

Yesterday gave you a lifelong friend and a friendship fine to share –

Look back into the past and to the treasures gathered there!

When I look back I am always sure to see

Faith and love and courage and deep humility!

Mrs. Cecil Mc

Courage to try new mediums as times changed. Courage to share her knowledge of cinema history, and her dedication to her art, lifelong learning and passion for life with me. Always boldly going ahead. I loved her passion as often expressed in two words: "What's next?"

Happy birthday Lillian Gish!
You brought so much happiness through just being yourself.

Jim Patterson
JamesPatterson705@gmail.com
www.ldgish.blogspot.com

Jim Patterson Remembers Lillian Gish in I Never Sang for My Father

I Never Sang Got My Father rand for 124 performances at the Longacre Theater on Broadway. January 1968 to May 1968. I was in elementary school and did not see. This Playbill comes from my aunt and uncle who saw the play in late March 1968.

"A soap opera is a soap opera whichever way you slice the soap." Clive Barnes began his review for the New York Times. "Lillian Gish's delicately fluttery mother, warm and attractive, is another performance worthy of a more productive cause," he wrote. "The writing," he said, "was overheated."

Hal Holbrooke, then 43, opens and ends the play with, "Death ends a life but not a relationship." It was a line Lillian, then 70 if one accepts 1898 as her birth, loved and repeated many times after the death of sister Dorothy Gish in 1968. Lillian's character, Margaret Garrison, dies during the play.

The Playbill is fascinating for several reasons. The bio paragraph for Lillian is largely consistent with her autobiography and interviews. Her most recent film at that time was The Comedians and it includes some silent and recent sound films as well as her favorite stage roles. It ends with this, "Miss Gish, who loaned her artistry to television in that medium's earliest hours, will be next seen in the telecast of Arsenic and Old Lace with Helen Hayes and Boris Karloff as her costars."

Sadly Karloff died and his part went to Fred Gwynne in the ABC Movie of the Week version of Arsenic and Old Lace. After I was that telecast, I became fascinated with Miss Gish and began reading and then correspondence to her through the Museum of Modern Art.

Another fascinating thing about this production of I Never Sang for My Father was silent star Lois Wilson, also a New Yorker, was Lillian's standby. Wilson was a Pennsylvanian whose parents moved to Alabama when she was a child. Wilson graduated Alabama Normal College, now the University of West Alabama. She went Hollywood to be in films where she won a beauty contest in 1915. Lois Wilson is considered the first Miss Alabama, She starred in many silents, perhaps the most notable was 1923's The Covered Wagon.

When I Never Sang for My Father was filmed in 1970 it starred Melvyn Douglas and Gene Hackman. Dorothy Stickney played the part Lillian originated on stage. Stickney originated Berthe in the original Broadway run of Pippin in 1976/7 with Ben Vereen and Irene Ryan. Stickney lived to be 101. The film received far better reviews than the play.

This Playbill contained cigarette commercials for Kent, Lark, Marlboro, and Pall Mall. Bianca, a breath drop, was also advertised.




Extra: Variety, April 9, 1969


Arsenic and Old lace
(Wednesday Night Movie)
With Helen Hayes, Lillian Gish, Robert Crane, Fred Gwynne, Sue Lyon, Billy De Wolfe, Bob Dishy, David Wayne, Jack Gilford, others.

Exec Producer: Hubble Robertson

Producer/Adapter: Luther Davis
Director: Robert Scheerer
120 minutes, Wed., 9 p.m.
Participating ABC TV (Tape)

ABC's TV revival of "Arsenic and Old Lace" was still almost as good as  it was 28 years ago  when Howard Lindsay and Russell Crouse first brought it to the Fulton Theater back in 1941.

Changes in the original script were limited to the necessary updating of a few topical gags to jive with the times plus turning the lead (Bob Crane) into a television critic and his finance (Sue Lyon) into a TV actress.

Acting was good and professional. But you'd expect that , from a cast of pros headed up by Helen Hayes and Lillian Gish as the  murderous but well-meaning little old Brewster sisters. Crane, of course, is chief hero of "Hogan's Heroes" and supporting thesps Fred Gwynne, Jack Gilford, David Wayne, Bob Dishy and Billy De Wolfe were almost as familiar to TV addicts.

Producer Luther Davis tried a couple of innovations to take the curse of TV's inherent disadvantages vis-à-vis the stage. The annoyance of the inevitable commercial interruptions was relieved somewhat by closing each pre-blurb scene with a slightly exaggerated expression of amusement, terror, or utter disbelief.

Also unusual were a couple of brief attempts to maintain elements of the original theater atmosphere, with the camera panning the crowd both pre-curtain and at curtain call. The first time, before action got underway, it seemed artificial and strained. But somehow, by the final curtain, the  panning back and forth between applauding audience and thesps on stage came off well. Especially so during the surprise twist at the very end when 11 of the 13 bodies, referred to but never seen during the action, came to life, emerged from their cellar graves to take their bows with the live ones.

The play ends with Crane relived to learn he is not related to the Brewster sisters. "I'm a bastard," he shouts.
Jim Patterson
JamesPatterson705@gmail.com

Jim Patterson and Fan Art of Lillian Gish from 1920s to 1980s.

George Haessler, 1982.

My favorite fan art of Lillian from LaVerne Decker, 1983, New York.

The famous hair brushing photograph. DC Times Herald 11/5/1942. It began in the Silent era and followed her to "The Whales of August."

 It was always a show stopper for me, even as a publicity photo like this from a stage play, "Mr. Sycamore."

Patrick Smart

Patrick Smart

Patrick Smart inspired by Lillian's performance in "The Swan."

Fan art inspired by Lillian's performance as Hester in "The Scarlet Letter."

Sunday News New York, November 29, 1942.

Frank Rennie's drawing inspired by Lillian's performance in "The White Sister."

Art commissioned by Life Magazine in 1940 as a tribute to "The Birth of a Nation." The woman is Lillian and the man is Henry B. Walthall. Artist is Frederic Taubes, 

International Star Registry of Lillian Gish, December, 1985. She'll always be a star.

"The Dream Princess of Hollywood" Lillian Gish, October, 1942.

Cartoon panel on Lillian's career. Being scared by Griffith with a gun, "swim icy rivers," and "still going strong." 1971. Silent film is no place for sissies. 

This is my favorite Hirschfeld of Gish with John Gielgud in Crime and Punishment, National Theater, New York.. 

Jim Patterson, Lillian Gish and Hedda Hopper's Column

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.

Jim Patterson, Lillian Gish and 1928's The Enemy

A few weeks ago, I saw scenes from Lillian's 1928 "The Enemy." This film is considered lost as the final reels are, as yet, unavailable in any collection. I liked what I saw of Lillian in the film and wondered if it existed in final form, what film historians would say of the work and Lilian's performance today.

Here is what Time magazine had to say about the film in its January 9, 1928, edition.

The Enemy. Two years ago in Manhattan, Playwright Channing Pollack offered theater-goers a play whose purpose was to prove the too often demonstrated assertion that War is Hell. Transposed now to the more extensive medium of the cinema, The Enemy monotonously but accurately hammers the nail of that assertion into the stout oak of the public intelligence.

The story is that of a young American who is roused from his wedding breakfast by the call to arms. His bride waits for him, trying to find money with which to buy food for herself and her baby, her mind always a battlefield of fears and sorrows. At last the young lieutenant who is supposed to have been killed. re-appears for a  conclusion that weakens, somewhat, the effect of the picture's sound and peaceful propaganda.

Brilliant direction by Fred Niblo does much to whip up a story that is pulling a heavy wagon of argument. But most of the credit for making The Enemy an engrossing and beautiful moving picture must go to Actress Lillian Gish, in the role of the wife whom war has robbed.

Now, 29,Actress Gish appeared on the stage for the first time when she was 4 years old at a salary of $10 weekly. Now she has $8,000 a week, a police-dog, a canary, a gluttonous appetite for licorice, and a reputation for frail, golden haired beauty that has suggested. in recent popular song, this recipe for exceptional loveliness: "Put Cleopatra in dish, add a dash of Lillian Gish."


I am hopeful a full print of The Enemy will surface somewhere in the world. Miracles do happen.







In a September 24, 1927 letter from I.G. Thalberg to Lillian, he addressed The Enemy in the third paragraph.

"The Enemy" looks very fine. It is still a trifle long and due to the fact that we just put out The Wind, I have not ruched on the editing of that picture, but you have nothing to worry about there. In fact, I think it will probably prove to be one of your most successful pictures."  Jim Note: We may never know  unless a full print can be found.


 Jim Patterson, Editor
www.LDGish.blogspot.com

Jim Patterson, Lillian Gish singing in Broadway Musical Jubilee

Here is our Playbill for Musical Jubliee at the St. James Theater. 

I had Christmas break and since I wanted to hear Lillian sing I was off, then by bus, to New York.

Here is Lillian's photo from the cover of Musical Jubilee Playbill. She was listed as "special guest star" for the production.

Here is the cast page from the Musical Jubilee Playbill from 1975. "and Special Guest Star Lillian Gish" just above title of the play.



Lillian's first song came in the tribute to the American military in Act I. She "sang" "I Didn't Raise My Boy to be a Soldier." It was a hit in 1912. She received large applause and did a commendable job, I thought. Lillian and Dorothy made their film debut, Twilight Zone theme music, in 1912.

Also in Act I, Lillian "sang" a hit from 1910 "Moonstruck"  This is interesting because Lillian was widely expected to be nominated for a Best Actress Oscar in 1987 for her last film "The Whales of August." Instead, Cher got the Oscar for, Twilight Zone music, her role in "Moonstruck."

In Act II, Lillian performed with Patrice Munsel and Tammy Grimes. Their song: 1928's "I Wanna Be Loved By You" written by Harry Ruby and Bert Kalmar. At MGM in 1928, Lillian starred as Letty in "Le Vent."

Lillian's final song was the Gershwin's 1927 hit  "S Wonderful" which she performed as a solo.


The Who's Who in the Cast bio on Lillian has errors. It said she made her screen debut in 1913 when it was 1912 in Griffith's "An Unseen Enemy." A glaring mistake: It says "The Birth of a Nation" was from 1916. Who wrote that? So many errors in Lillian's publicity!

Jim Patterson, Editor
LDGish.blogspot.com

James Patterson Lillian Gish and McTeague's Saloon in San Francisco

Writer James Patterson at McTeague's Saloon in San Francisco. Lillian's letters are on my flash drive. The restaurant derives its name from the Frank Norris novel of the same name that became the incredible 1924 Erich von Stroheim film nine hour "Greed." One of the most starling endings of any film.


Navarro's Silent Film Guide says of the surviving version of "Greed," it is still considered a classic. von Stroheim famously accused the film editors of "butchery." Leading lady Zasu Pitts is strangely attractive as Trina. I could not immediately find a Lillian quote on the film and her autobiography, "The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me," does not mention the film or its director.

James Patterson, Editor
LDGish.blogspot.com
JamesPatterson705@gmail.com