Bobby Harron, Early Hollywood Tragedy

Robert ("Bobby") Harron's life was almost literally a rags-to-riches story. He started working for Biograph Studios as a teenager, doing janitorial work and acting as messenger boy. Eventually, the up-and-coming D.W. Griffith decided to put Bobby - still in his teens - in front of the camera, often plastering a mustache on him to make him look older (before the age of twenty, he would play the part of a married man with a baby in The Battle of Elderbrush Gulch). He had an unusual face, with a high, somewhat bulging forehead; he grew into his looks and became a very effective leading man.

Bobby was close friends with the Gish family, and Lillian claimed that he and her sister Dorothy were a couple starting from the time he was fifteen and she was thirteen. The Biograph actors were like a family, and Bobby - one of the youngest members - was a favorite. He came from a large biological family, and helped to support them; his sister Tessie and brother John also became actors, both of them appearing in Hearts of the World (1919), in which Bobby played the lead opposite his by-then frequent leading lady, Lillian Gish.

Bobby's death in 1920 was sudden and mysterious. He was in New York for the premiere of Way Down East - starring Griffith's new "discovery", Richard Barthelmess - when he called the reception desk of his hotel and gasped out that he had shot himself. During a period of consciousness in the hospital, Bobby claimed that he had purchased a gun from a man who needed money, then put it in his jacket pocket and forgot about it. When he was taking the jacket out of the closet, the gun fell to the floor and discharged, the bullet penetrating Bobby's lung. In those days of no antibiotics, the wound was a death sentence.

It has been suggested that the wound was self-inflicted; evidently, Bobby had been keen to play the lead in Way Down East, and was depressed at being passed over for Griffith's latest star. However, when asked by his priest if he had shot himself deliberately, he denied it.

Griffith's cameraman, Billy Bitzer, stated that everything changed after Bobby's death. He had been so young, so enthusiastic when he started to work for Griffith, and suddenly, he was gone. An era had ended for Griffith, his actors, and the history of motion picture. Dorothy Gish, deeply in love with Bobby, was desolate.

The year before Bobby's death, his sister Tessie contracted the dreaded Spanish flu and died; Lillian Gish also fell gravely ill, but survived. John Harron would die of a sudden heart attack in 1939.

There's something very touching about Bobby; his youth, his eagerness, his acting ability. The knowledge that this man, who almost grew up in front of the camera, would die so young (he was only 27), makes his remaining work all the more poignant to me. Hearts of the World was a perfect showcase for him - well, for all the actors, really - and I wonder: What would he have done if he had lived? Would he have made the transition to talkies? What sort of future would he have had?

All unanswerable.