Celebrating a Private Life in Film : Movies: Film editor Maggie Booth, who started her career with D. W. Griffith, will be honored by the American Cinematheque with an eight-film retrospective.

Woodrow Wilson was President and World War I was raging in Europe when a 17-year-old Los Angeles girl named Margaret (Maggie) Booth went to work as a film cutter and splicer in D. W. Griffith’s laboratory in 1915. It was only a couple of years ago that she finally set aside the scissors (symbolic if not actual) as consulting editor to producer Ray Stark--an extraordinary career that lasted into its eighth decade.

Maggie Booth, who will be 93 in January, is being honored this weekend by the American Cinematheque with an eight-film retrospective. Sharp of mind, memory and tongue but forced at last to use a cane, she intends to be at all the sessions with moderator Chuck Workman. She still goes to the races every Saturday during the Santa Anita meeting.

The other guests at the retrospective will include director George Sidney, a colleague from her long tenure at MGM; Sydney Pollack, with whom she worked on “The Way We Were”; director Robert Wise, who began as an editor and did “Citizen Kane”; and, health permitting, Ian Wolfe, himself 94 and a supporting actor in the Gable-Laughton “Mutiny on the Bounty.”

One of Booth’s brothers, Elmer, was an actor who had left Los Angeles, where the family lived, to work in New York and returned to California to join Griffith’s company. Two months later, he was killed in an auto accident coming home from a country club party with director Tod Browning (who later made “Freaks”). In sympathy, Griffith gave Elmer’s sister a job, and a long career.

When Griffith lost his studio, Booth was invited to come to work for Louis B. Mayer (who had not yet acquired the M and the G of MGM) at his studio, which was then on Mission Road, next door to Col. Selig’s zoo, just east of downtown Los Angeles.

“I once went into the vault to get some film and there was a monkey jumping around,” Booth recalled one recent morning in her elegant Beverly Hills apartment. “And at night a trainer used to take one of those big apes out for a walk around our lot. It scared me to death.”

Billy Shea, who was Mayer’s principal editor, had first asked Booth to come down to cut some negatives on a Sunday. “When I finished it was dark and there was no one around and no one had told me how to get a bus home. I stood on the street crying until a man told me where the bus stopped. I cried all the way home. I told my mother I’d never go back there again.”

But later that night, Shea called to ask her to work full time, and he promised to deliver her back and forth to Hollywood. “That’s how young I was,” she says. In 1936, after the sudden death of Irving Thalberg, the studio’s young creative genius, Mayer asked Booth to be supervising editor on all MGM films.

“Mr. Mayer was a businessman,” Booth says succinctly. “He was very fond of the Andy Hardy pictures.”

Booth’s name never appeared in the credits and, in an industry nourished on publicity, she remained rigorously private. When I first interviewed her in 1973 there was not a single clipping on her in The Times’ library. “We didn’t give a hoot about credit,” she said then. “We just wanted to get the job done.”

(When I checked this time there were two clips: mine, and an announcement of a major gift she made to the Motion Picture and Television Fund.)

Her sense of privacy may have helped endear her to Greta Garbo. “I was the only one she’d allow on the set when she was working,” Booth says. “I was Christmas shopping one year and I saw her at the lingerie counter in Bullocks Wilshire. I thought about going over to speaking to her but I thought, no, she likes to be private. The next day at the studio she scolded me. ‘Why didn’t you come say hello to me in Bullocks?’ ”

Thalberg, she says, once asked her if she didn’t want to become a director and a producer. “I said I’d rather be a very good editor, if I could be.” Her association with the studio lasted for 46 years, until she retired (from a Mayer-less and vastly changed MGM) in 1968. She was 70 but was instantly wooed out of retirement by Ray Stark, who made her his supervising editor, working first on “A Boy Ten Feet Tall.”

Stark, who is unable to attend the retrospective, sent an affectionate letter about Maggie Booth, remembering the disastrous first preview of “The Way We Were” in San Francisco. The audience, avid for the Streisand-Redford love story, was impatient with the political talk. “The cards,” said Stark, “were not love notes.”

Booth, Pollack, Stark and writer Alvin Sargent held a four-hour council of war in a hotel room. Booth and Pollack went to a cutting room and removed 18 minutes. The screening in the same San Francisco theater the next night was a smash.

Booth’s first mentor was Griffith’s editor, John Stahl, who preached the gospel of rhythm in editing, echoing (even in silent film) the music of speech. “He taught me how to think about it. He’d come from the stage, and it was wonderful to have worked with a man from the theater. He understood that conversation was music. The voice rises and falls.” Rhythm was all. “In silent days I used to count one -two-three- four -five-six (a waltz-like lilt).

“Often there was music on the set, a violin or a little trio. The cameramen would crank to it and the actors would catch the mood.

“We premiered all the time, even with silent films, and we re-shot, even if we had to rebuild the sets.”

Like many early editors, she ran the film through her fingers, feeling the rhythm, sensing the difference a cut of so little as two or three frames could make. Booth says, regretfully, that she does not see much evidence of that kind of editing in present films.

“The only picture I’ve seen recently that had some of the old values was ‘Driving Miss Daisy,’ ” she says.

The films in the retrospective can only hint at the range of films on which she has kept her editorial eye. Friday night’s films are “Camille” (1936) and “Mutiny on the Bounty” (1935). Saturday’s choices are John Huston’s “Fat City” (1972) and a glorious double bill of Joan Crawford in “Dancing Lady” (1933) and Jean Harlow in “Bombshell” (also 1933).

There’s a late Sunday afternoon double feature of “The Bridge of San Luis Rey” (1929), which has a spoken prologue by Henry B. Walthall but is thereafter the last silent film MGM made, and “Five and Ten” (1931), a melodrama that co-starred Marion Davies and Leslie Howard. The tribute concludes Sunday night with “The Way We Were” (1973).

Information: (213) 466-FILM.