Page:Once a Clown, Always a Clown.djvu/174

ONCE A CLOWN, ALWAYS A CLOWN for time is relative and as picture history goes 1915 is somewhere back in the French and Indian War. Only six years earlier David W. Griffith, under the anonymous bushel of the Biograph, was turning out one one-reeler a day in a brownstone front house at Number 11 East Fourteenth Street, New York, and paying Florence Lawrence, Florence Turner, Mary Pickford, Flora Finch, Mack Sennett, David Miles and Bobbie Harron five dollars a day for their services. Pathé was just emigrating from France to make chase comedies in Weehawken, and Vitagraph was organizing in Flatbush. Actors and directors alike were nameless on the screen. Miss Pickford was identified only as the Biograph Blonde, and regularly confused with Blanche Sweet. English audiences demanded the names of their favorites, and to gratify this whim the London offices of the Biograph tagged Mr. Griffith's hired hands synthetically. Old posters still are extant in which Mabel Normand is labeled as Muriel Fortescue, Mack Sennett masquerades as Mr. Walter Terry, and Blanche Sweet as Daphne Wayne. All this in 1909.

The Triangle was such a brave and ill-fated enterprise that it justifies recounting. It took its name from the Big Three, Griffith, Thomas