*
When we arrived in Chicago, we were greeted by the studio manager, but no Mr Spoor. Mr Spoor, he said, was away on business and would not return until after the New Year holiday. I did not think Spoor’s absence had any significance then, because nothing would happen at the studio until after the first of the year. Meanwhile I spent New Year’s Eve with Anderson, his wife and family. On New Year’s Day Anderson left for California, assuring me that as soon as Spoor returned he would attend to everything, including the ten-thousand-dollar bonus. The studio was in the industrial district, and, at one time, had evidently been a warehouse. The morning I showed up there, no Spoor had yet arrived, nor were there any instructions left about my business arrangements. Immediately I sensed that something was fishy and that the office knew more than they cared to divulge. But it didn’t worry me; I was confident that a good picture would solve all my problems. So I asked the manager if he knew that I was to get the full cooperation of the studio staff and carte blanche for all their facilities. ‘Of course,’ he replied. ‘Mr Anderson has left instructions about that.’
‘Then I would like to start work immediately,’ I said.
‘Very well,’ he answered. ‘On the first floor you will find the head of the scenario department, Miss Louella Parsons, who will give you a script.’
‘I don’t use other people’s scripts, I write my own,’ I snapped.
I was belligerent because they seemed so vague about everything and because of Spoor’s absence; besides, the studio personnel were stuffy and went around like bank clerks, carrying requisition papers as though they were members of the Guaranty Trust Company – the business end of it was very impressive, but not their films. In the upstairs office the different departments were partitioned like tellers’ grilles. It was anything but conducive to creative work. At six o’clock, no matter whether a director was in the middle of a scene or not, the lights were turned off and everybody went home.
The next morning I went to the casting grille. ‘I would like a cast of some sort,’ I said dryly, ‘so will you kindly send me members of your company who are unoccupied?’
They presented people whom they thought might be suitable. There was a chap with cross eyes named Ben Turpin, who seemed to know the ropes and was not doing much with Essanay at the time. Immediately I took a liking to him, so he was chosen. But I had no leading lady. After I had had several interviews, one applicant seemed a possibility, a rather pretty young girl whom the company had just signed up. But oh, God! I could not get a reaction out of her. She was so unsatisfactory that I gave up and dismissed her. Gloria Swanson years later told me that she was the girl and that, having dramatic aspirations and hating slapstick comedy, she had been deliberately uncooperative.
Francis X. Bushman, then a great star with Essanay, sensed my dislike of the place. ‘Whatever you think about the studio,’ he said, ‘it is just the ‘antithesis’: but it wasn’t; I didn’t like the studio and I didn’t like the word ‘antithesis’. Circumstances went from bad to worse. When I wanted to see my rushes, they ran the original negative to save the expense of a positive print. This horrified me. And when I demanded that they should make a positive print, they reacted as though I wanted to bankrupt them. They were smug and self-satisfied. Having been one of the first to enter the film business, and being protected by patent rights which gave them a monopoly, their last consideration was the making of good pictures. And although other companies were challenging their patent rights and making better films, Essanay still went smugly on, dealing out scenarios like playing cards every Monday morning.
I had almost finished my first picture, which was called His New Job, and two weeks had elapsed and still no Mr Spoor had shown up. Having received neither the bonus nor my salary, I was contemptuous. ‘Where is this Mr Spoor?’ I demanded at the front office. They were embarrassed and could give no satisfactory explanation. I made no effort to hide my contempt and asked if he always conducted his business affairs in this way.
Years later I heard from Spoor himself what had happened. It appears that when Spoor, who had never heard of me at that time, learned that Anderson had signed me up for a year at twelve hundred dollars a week with a ten-thousand-dollar bonus, he sent Anderson a frantic wire, wanting to know if he had done mad. And when Spoor heard that Anderson had signed me purely as a gamble, on the recommendation of Jess Robbins, his anxiety was twofold. He had comics who were getting only seventy-five dollars a week, the best of them, and their comedies barely paid for themselves. Hence Spoor’s absence from Chicago.
When he returned, however, he lunched at one of the big Chicago hotels with several friends who, to his surprise, complimented him about my joining his company. Also, more than the usual publicity began piling up in the studio office about Charlie Chaplin. So he thought he would try an experiment. He gave a page-boy a quarter and had me paged throughout the hotel. As the boy went through the lobby shouting: ‘Call for Mr Charlie Chaplin,’ people began to congregate until it was packed with stir and excitement. This was his first indication of my popularity. The second was what had happened at the film exchange while he was away: he discovered that even before I had started the picture there was an advance sale of sixty-five copies, something unprecedented, and by
