Fabrizio del Wrongo writes:

In those days the one girl D.W. ever appeared with outside the studio was Lillian Gish, although none of us even dared whisper that their association was anything but platonic. Nobody had ever heard D.W. address Lillian except as “Miss Geesch,” mispronouncing her name as he did mine. Lillian was the personification of all the heroines D.W. ever created, so sweetly childlike, reticent, and timorous that even then her type of girl belonged to a far-distant past. The two made an extremely romantic-looking pair. I remember seeing them enter the grand ballroom of the old Alexandria Hotel in Los Angeles one night, when D.W. looked like one of his own Southern aristocrats of “The Birth of a Nation” and Lillian, in her pink ball gown and black lace mitts, was so breathtakingly beautiful that for a man not to be in love with her seemed inhuman. Astoundingly enough, D.W. seemed almost inhuman; he was of Welsh extraction, and the Welsh are a very peculiar breed, poetic, unpredictable, remote, and fiercely independent. For such a man to be in love must be terribly frustrating, because his deepest instinct is to be a loner.

— Anita Loos

Related

• Loos’ memoir, “A Girl Like I,” is a fascinating account of early Hollywood.