Part One

Andrew and Louise Carnegie did have a daughter, but she was named Margaret, and bears no similarity to the Mabel of this book. Margaret Carnegie was not involved with moving pictures in any way.

All the moving pictures named throughout this book are real. Some have been lost, but many can be viewed in various places on the internet. Due to his great success and fame in the years after this story is set, D.W. Griffith’s early Biograph pictures were carefully documented and – for the most part – preserved. There are amazing archival records of the shooting dates, locations, and release dates of all of Griffith’s films for the Biograph. I shifted a few shooting dates to fit the timeline of my story, but not by much. (All the chapter titles in this book are actual titles of early Griffith pictures for the Biograph.)

Arthur Marvin shot Politician’s Love Story in Central Park that day, not Billy Bitzer. The two cameramen were both used by Griffith, but after Marvin’s death in 1911 Bitzer became Griffith’s main cameraman and played a vital role in many of the technical advances made in his films.

The Carnegie mansion at East 91st Street is now the Cooper-Hewitt Museum of Design. Some rooms are taken up with Design exhibits, but several rooms are still furnished as they were when the Carnegies lived there. Definitely worth a visit!

Some of the Carnegie servants named are real people, others (Elsie) are inventions.

Skibo Castle. Absolutely true. It is now a luxury resort and golf course, home to many celebrity weddings (eg. Madonna and Guy Ritchie).

Simplified Spelling = true. The tutor Mr. Futsell = invention.

Mark Twain was indeed a friend of Andy’s, and sent young Margaret the occasional jokey letter, but I have not found any evidence he ever visited Skibo. The story about Edison filming him is true.

I don’t think Carrie Nation ever lectured at the Carnegie house, though the quotes I include are indeed hers, and she did talk to a huge crowd at a Chautauqua that summer.

Mack Sennett did have outlandishly long arms.

The Biograph troup left for California in 1909 from a ferry dock and caught the train on the other side. The events I describe as taking place in the train station really played out at the ferry dock or at the train later. The details of the departure (the standoff with Mrs. Smith, Jack put aboard at the last minute, Johnson running up late, the surprise revelation that Griffith and Linda were married) are all true, with the exception that the Griffiths took a different train from the rest of the company.

Halley’s Comet and Mark Twain’s prediction of his own death are absolutely true.

Part Two

There is no Trumbull School. Margaret attended a different school in the same general neighbourhood (upper west side).

The Mark Twain footage at the beginning of Edison’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court can be found online.

All newspaper articles and classifieds are real and can be found via the New York Times archive site: Timesmachine.nytimes.com.

There was actually, according to Schickel (in D. W. Griffith: An American Life), a doorman at the Biograph by 1912, so Mabel wouldn’t have been able to just stroll inside.

Mabel claims Mary was eighteen in 1912. She was actually twenty, though she frequently shaved years off her age when applying for work, so it is likely nobody at the Biograph knew her real age.

The “A. Loos” who wrote The New York Hat was a very young Anita Loos, who went on to have a very successful screenwriting career. She is most well-known for her novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

I wasn’t able to find out if Carnegie was EVER in favour of female suffrage.
Anecdotes about Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter Alice are 100% true. She was a real firecracker.

I don’t think Lillian actually board a train on opening day of Grand Central, but Belasco did buy her a ticket to California and she departed sometime that month.

Margaret, the real Carnegie daughter, did grow apart from her father, and disagreed with him on many points, but this didn’t happen until she was older, around the time she “came out” at age eighteen.