“The Good Little Devil” did not follow any of the announced dates. It opened successfully in Washington, or Philadelphia, and was in Baltimore for Christmas. They gave two performances that day, during the second of which there was an accident—serious enough, though it might have been worse.
In the act where she landed on the wall, she left it with a step-down of six feet. The wire, of course, lifted her down, but in this performance something was wrong, and she literally stepped into space. The sickening, helpless feeling of expecting support and finding none! The fall made her quite ill; her understudy had to finish the play.
“I cried all night,” she wrote Nell, “I was so lonely and broken-hearted.”
She was apparently not injured, but terribly shaken; and then, the audience had laughed. Mr. Belasco hurried to her dressing-room to comfort her. The audience was not laughing at her, he said, but at the incident. She must not mind that; everything was going to be all right. It was, but the shock had weakened her.
Back in New York, with another hard siege of rehearsing, before the opening there. Griffith, as was his custom each winter, had taken his company to Los Angeles, Dorothy with them. Lillian, to save money, lived in a tiny room at the Marlton Hotel, in 8th Street, and with a Sterno lamp, cooked her food, which consisted of tinned things and tea. Weakened as she undoubtedly was by her fall, this was but poor nourishment on which to meet Belasco’s strenuous rehearsals. January 8 (1913), she wrote:
It is now 3:30 in the morning of Wednesday, and I have just returned from a dress rehearsal. We open tonight, and everything has to be just so; we rehearsed until 4:30 yesterday morning.
Nell, I don’t know how to thank you for what you have offered me. You both can’t know how wonderful it is to have someone offer me a home, and how I would love to follow the desire of my heart and come to you. But I can’t. I can’t, because I have to make my way in this world from now on. Mother has worked all her life; surely, it’s my turn, now....
The picture you painted for me in your letter made me cry, because I was reading it in my dressing-room, and I happened to glance up at a mirror, and there I sat, all false, with paint and cosmetics covering my face, and it came to me what a distance it was from my life to yours.