Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood 9780520921382

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WITHOUT LYING DOWN

COAUTHORED BY CARI B E A U C H A M P Hollywood on the Riviera

WITHOUT

LYING DOWN ftrances Wlavion and the IPowerful Women of &airly Hollywood

CARI e e A U C W A M P

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeky • Los Angeles • London

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England Copyright © 1997 by Cari Beauchamp All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. First Paperback Printing 1998 Published by arrangement with Scribner, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster Inc. Set in Goudy Old-Style DESIGNED BY ERICH MOBBING

Manufactured in the United States of America 11

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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.484992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

For my sons, TEO and JAKE— with the hope that they may know the joy of women as equal partners and the freedom that comes from learning from history.

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WTWOUT LYNG DOWN "I spent my life searching for a man to look up to without lying down." —FRANCES MARION

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IPrologue

Wednesday evening, November 5, 1930, Fiesta Room of the Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles, California

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s Frances Marion rose to accept the Academy Award for Screenwriting for her original story The Big House, she became the first woman writer to win an Oscar. Since 1917, she had been the highest-paid screenwriter in Hollywood—male or female—and was hailed as "the all-time best script and story writer the motion picture world has ever produced." Just forty and "as beautiful as the stars she wrote for/' Frances was already credited with writing over one hundred produced films. Her importance to MGM was reflected by the fact that films she had written were nominated this evening in seven of the eight award categories—every one but Interior Decoration. As she looked out from the podium at the six hundred people gathered at the Ambassador, she saw the faces of the friends she had literally grown up with in the business since first arriving in Los Angeles in 1912. There was Mary Pickford, who called Frances "the pillar of my career," for she had written Rebecca ofSunnybrook Farm, Polly anna, A Little Princess, and a dozen more of Pickford's greatest successes. Frances was also her best friend and had seen her through her divorce from Owen Moore and marriage to Douglas Fairbanks; Frances and Mary had even honeymooned with their new husbands together in Europe. Irving Thalberg was the "boy genius of Hollywood," but Frances called him "my rock of Gibraltar" and he was the only man in the room whose opinion she truly valued and respected. He in turn "adored her and trusted her completely." Greta Garbo still only spoke Swedish when Frances met her sitting on the sidelines of the set of The Scarlet Letter and tonight she was nominated for Best Actress in Anna Christie, adapted for the screen by Frances Marion.

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WITHOUT LYING DOWN Norma Shearer was now the "Queen of the lot," but she was still fighting for roles when Frances first knew her, long before she married her boss Irving Thalberg. Tonight, Norma was nominated for Best Actress in Their Own Desire, adapted for the screen by Frances Marion. Clarence Brown was nominated for Best Director for Anna Christie and had come a long way since being the assistant on The Poor Little Rich Girl in 1917 when he witnessed the "spontaneous combustion" created by Frances and Mary Pickford as they worked together. Marie Dressier had been a top vaudeville star when Frances was a cub reporter interviewing her in 1911, but Marie's career was over and she was facing dire poverty fifteen years later when Frances wrote the films that brought her to Hollywood to become MGM's top moneymaker. The next year she would win the Best Actress award for the role Frances wrote for her in Min and Bill Gloria Swanson was one of Hollywood's most glamourous stars; she was married to a count and spent a fortune on maintaining her fabulous wardrobe. Tonight, Gloria was only weeks away from learning that she too had been duped by a treacherous Joseph P Kennedy, just as Frances had been two years earlier. Hobart Bosworth was the eminence grise of the industry, having acted in over three hundred films, but in 1914 he owned the studio where Frances was first hired as an actress and assistant to the director Lois Weber at fifteen dollars a week. Conrad Nagel was tonight's master of ceremonies and a popular star, but Frances had first seen him as a young man rehearsing on the Broadway stage in 1915. She had sat alone in the theater that day with the impresario William Brady, who hired her on the spot to write for his World studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey, where she spent over a year honing her skills. Sam Goldwyn had been the first to raise her salary to $3,000 a week in 1925 after she wrote some of his biggest hits, including Stella Dallas and The Winning of Barbara Worth. Louis B. Mayer was now her boss at MGM, the largest and most successful studio in Hollywood, but he had pinched Frances's rear end the first time he hired her to write a script at his then small studio only seven years earlier. George Cukor was still a young emerging talent at RKO, but they were to become lifelong friends after making Dinner at Eight and Camille together. Cukor called Frances a "Holy Wonder—so ravishingly beautiful and so talented." And there was Adela Rogers St. Johns, her friend since their girlhood in San Francisco. Adela would also be nominated for Best Original Story in 10

CARI BEAUCHAMP 1932, but lose to Frances when she won her second Oscar for The Champ. Yet Adela harbored no jealousy of the woman she claimed was "touched with genius. As a writer, she is the unquestioned head of her profession.... As a woman, she is a philanthropist, a patroness of young artists, and herself the most brilliant, versatile and accomplished person in Hollywood." Few knew or loved the industry as Frances did, yet after she said her demure "Thank you very much" and returned to her seat, she studied the statuette and decided, "I saw it as a perfect symbol of the picture business: a powerful athletic body clutching a gleaming sword, but with half of his head, the part which held his brains, completely sliced off." Privately, she was proud of her Oscar for The Big House because she had conquered a variety of obstacles to create a realistic film where for the first time audiences heard prison doors slam shut, inmates1 steps shuffle down the corridors, and metal cups bang on the mess tables. Writing of that night, several historians called Frances Marion "the author of The Big House and just about everything else at MGM" but she called herself "a mouse at the feast" that was Hollywood. She habitually used self-deprecating humor as her armor against the professional and personal challenges and tragedies she faced. Eventually Frances was credited with writing 325 scripts covering every conceivable genre. She also directed and produced half a dozen films, was the first Allied woman to cross the Rhine in World War I, and served as the vice president and only woman on the first board of directors of the Screen Writers Guild. She painted, sculpted, spoke several languages fluently, and played "concert caliber" piano. Yet she claimed writing was "the refuge of the shy" and she shunned publicity; she was uncomfortable as a heroine, but she refused to be a victim. She would have four husbands and dozens of lovers and tell her best friends she spent her life "searching for a man to look up to without lying down." She claimed the two sons she raised on her own were "my proudest accomplishment"—they came first and then "it's a photofinish between your work and your friends." Her friendships were as legendary as her stories and some of the best were with her fellow writers for during the teens, 1920s, and early 1930s, almost one quarter of the screenwriters in Hollywood were women. Half of all the films copyrighted between 1911 and 1925 were written by women. While Photoplay mused that "Strangely enough, women outrank men as continuity writers," it wasn't strange to them. Women had always found sanctuary in writing; it was accomplished in private and provided a creative vent when little was expected or accepted of a woman other than to be a good wife and mother. For Frances and her friends, a virtue was derived 11

WITHOUT LYING DOWN from oppression; with so little expected of them, they were free to accomplish much. They were drawn to a business that, for a time, not only allowed, but welcomed women. And Cleo Madison, Gene Gauntier, Lois Weber, Ruth Ann Baldwin, Dorothy Arzner, Margaret Booth, Blanche Sewall, Anne Bauchens, and hundreds of other women flocked to Hollywood, where they could flourish, not just as actresses or writers, but also as directors, producers, and editors. With few taking moviemaking seriously as a business, the doors were wide open to women. Frances maintained they took care of each other and claimed "I owe my greatest success to women. Contrary to the assertion that women do all in their power to hinder one another's progress, I have found that it has always been one of my own sex who has given me a helping hand when I needed it." Today, names of screenwriters like Zoe Akins, Jeanie Macpherson, Beulah Marie Dix, Lenore Coffee, Anita Loos, June Mathis, Bess Meredyth, Jane Murfin, Adela Rogers St. Johns, Sonya Levien, and Salka Viertel are too often found only in the footnotes of Hollywood histories. But seventy years ago, they were highly paid, powerful players at the studios that churned out films at the rate of one a week. And for over twenty-five years, no writer was more sought after than Frances Marion; with her versatile pen and a caustic wit, she was a leading participant and witness to one of the most creative eras for women in American history. This is her story.

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arion Benson Owens first publicly documented her creative talents at San Francisco's Hamilton Grammar School "when I was caught drawing cartoons of my teachers on the blackboard and was expelled from all public schools." As a rule, she was very well behaved, having been taught early "the hypocrisies of social graces." Yet while others might see her dismissal as something to be ashamed of, Marion was always to view it with a sense of accomplishment. Just twelve years old, she had been set apart from those she considered "fastidious and dull" and that was definitely a step in the right direction.1 San Francisco in 1900 prided itself on being a cosmopolitan city, but the well-off and socially active Owens family at times stretched the limits of social acceptance. Her father was born in 1857 in Council Bluffs, Iowa, where his parents had immigrated from Missouri when the Iowa Territory opened. Len Douglas Owens arrived in a prospering San Francisco at the age of twenty-four and quickly established himself in the advertising business. He was anxious to channel his ambitions and install himself in society, and Minnie Benson Hall, almost ten years his junior, had the bearing and the background to help him achieve his goals. Born and raised in San Francisco, Minnie was the daughter of Charles and Aimee Grizwald Hall, who had "come around the Horn" to California from New York following the Gold Rush of 1848. Music was the foundation of the household. Charles owned a piano factory and played concert violin and Aimee was an accomplished soprano and pianist, Minnie was not yet eighteen when she married the twenty-seven-yearold Len Owens in 1884. Over six feet tall with carved Welsh features, Len was the extrovert, serving on the board of the Olympic Club and becoming a champion pistol shooter and all-around outdoorsman. Minnie prided herself on creating a household that was a center for artists and visiting musicians like Italian soprano Luisa Tetrazzini, the Australian soprano Dame Nellie Melba, and Enrico Caruso.2 13

WITHOUT LYING DOWN Their large house on O'Farrell Street also became home for Minnie's aunt and uncle, George and Jane Benson, when they moved from New York shortly after the Owenses were married. George worked at a local lumberyard and Aunt Jane was a help as the children arrived; Maude in February of 1886, Marion on November 18, 1888, and Len junior in May of 1890. Len senior organized a bicycle club for men and they rode all over northern California on the weekends. He became an investor in Aetna Springs, a six-hundred-acre ranch in the Pope Valley, and by 1896 he was the sole owner of the property. He created the Aetna Springs Mineral Water Company to bottle the water from its natural springs, promoted it as a drink of great "medicinal value" to those suffering from "neuralgia, indigestion, rheumatism, dyspepsia and many other ills," and distributed it through his new drug and supply company south of Market Street.3 Leris advertising business was also flourishing. He brought in Tom Varney and Charles Green as partners and their firm specialized in creating and posting signs on fences and in trolleys and streetcars. While Minnie was most comfortable in her roles as hostess and mother, Len's life now took him everywhere but home. In the fall of 1898, he assured his wife he would always support her and the children, but he wanted a divorce. Minnie and the Bensons stayed in the house on O'Farrell and the children continued to go to Hamilton Grammar School, less than two blocks from their home. Just before her twelfth birthday, Marion's father told her he was marrying again. His fiancee, Isabel, was the eldest daughter of the celebrated and wealthy lawyer Edgar F. Preston. Eighteen years younger than Len, Isabel had never been married before and, unlike Minnie, was an outdoorswoman who shared his love of horseback riding and bicycling.4 Len and Isabel were married in June of 1901 to what the newspapers called "the excitement of the exclusive set," and in spite of its being his second marriage, they were listed in the bible of society, the Blue Book. Unlike those in eastern cities, San Franciscans were proud not to attach a negative stigma to personal preferences and took their attitude as an outward sign of their sophisticated nature.5 Marion responded to her father's remarriage by adopting an "I don't care" attitude that culminated in her dismissal from school a few months later. She turned more than ever to her adored great-aunt and -uncle. Aunt Jane, in her early sixties, was an amateur spiritualist and held weekly seances in the parlor. With the lights down low, up to a dozen elderly women held hands around the large round table and the sessions opened with a rendition of "Nearer My God to Thee." Young Marion played the part of the channeler, using her free-floating imagination to give voice to historical figures and friends and relatives who had passed on. 14

CARI BEAUCHAMP Uncle George was a retired seaman with a full white beard and a vocabulary honed by his years at sea. He barely tolerated his wife's dabbling with the other world and disapproved heartily of involving Marion in it. To give their niece what he considered a needed balance in her education, George took her with him to visit his old seafaring friends in the saloons of the Barbary Coast, where she listened to their stories of shipwrecks and the voyages of their youth.6 A bout with polio kept Marion at home for several months and she became a prolific reader. Tutors for Spanish, French, and music were brought in, but most of her waking hours were consumed with reading and writing in her daily diary, which she kept hidden under her mattress.7 While the family encouraged original thoughts, it was made clear that they should be kept to oneself to avoid offending others. Many evenings, the dinner table was enlarged for her mother's guests and Marion learned early to be comfortable in an adult setting and how much easier things were for women and girls if they simply smiled and kept quiet. At the end of the day, there was always the diary to record what she really thought. When Marion recovered from her polio, her mother decided it was time for her to be sent fifteen miles south to St. Margaret's Hall Boarding School in San Mateo. With a reputation as an excellent preparatory school for the elite eastern women's colleges, St. Margaret's offered a strict academic curriculum, and the annual tuition of $500 assured economic exclusivity. Established by the Reverend and Mrs. George Wallace in 1891, St. Margaret's advertised aim was "to prepare its pupils to adorn the family and social circle, not only with intellectual culture, but also with graceful manners, refined tastes and Christian character" and to "secure a foundation for the super-structure of a noble womanhood." While Christian character with a small "c" would always come naturally to her, the daily dose of Episcopalian liturgy failed to inspire her. "I belong to no established faith—I never have," Marion would make clear to anyone who asked.8 While schooling society's daughters in their simple white uniforms, St. Margaret's itself was rather stark, consisting of several wooden buildings fronting a wide dirt road laced with fruit and palm trees. The girls wrote and staged plays and were frequently taken to local lectures, allowed to visit the stores of San Mateo when chaperoned, and invited to dinners and dances at the large estates nearby. Marion took the train to San Francisco on occasional weekends and school vacations. She and her brother and sister were welcome at her father's new home at 3232 Jackson Street, but the addition of two half brothers, Edgar, born in 1902, and Francis the following year, made Marion uncomfortable and gradually she reduced her visits.9 15

WITHOUT LYING DOWN In the summers, she traveled with her mother, going to Alaska one year and Mexico the next. Marion was becoming an astute observer of human nature and developing a radar for hypocrisy in all its forms. The stark contrast between the poverty of the people of Mexico and the riches of the churches seeded a lifelong resistance to organized religion, but she was thrilled to trek into the mountains with a group of Yaqui Indians, learning only afterward they had journeyed farther from the cities than any white women had previously dared. She took pride in improving her Spanish and furthering her belief, first instilled by her mother in particular and San Francisco in general, that women could go where their interests led them, as long as they outwardly appeared to behave themselves.10 In boarding school, Marion excelled at languages and music and blossomed as an artist under the tutelage of Charles Chapel Judson. When Judson, a respected painter active in the San Francisco Art Association, was asked to join the faculty of the newly created Mark Hopkins Art Institute, Marion begged her parents to allow her to transfer there. After three years at St. Margaret's, Marion was chafing to move on. She was drawing constantly, sketching every face she saw, as well as writing poetry and short stories. Family friends like the writers Jack London and Ella Wheeler Wilcox encouraged her to send off samples of her work to various publications and her poem "California's Latest," by Marion B. Owens, an ode to Luther Burbank's daisy and illustrated with her own drawings, took up an entire page of Sunset magazine's May 1905 issue.11 That fall, the sixteen-year-old Marion was accepted at the Mark Hopkins Art Institute and the fact that it was housed in San Francisco's most stately mansion and run in cooperation with the University of California at Berkeley gave it increased credibility in her parents' eyes. She moved back in with her mother, Maude, Len junior, Aunt Jane, and Uncle George, where she was able to be a part of her parents' society, spread her wings with her fellow students, and participate in the burgeoning Bohemian community. San Francisco in 1905 was the largest city west of the Mississippi. One third of the population of 400,000 had been born on foreign soil, one third were children of immigrants. Almost 20,000 Chinese lived crushed into five square blocks and knew better than to go beyond Powell or Broadway. Danish, German, Polish, and various other recent European immigrants were almost as densely packed into tenements south of Market Street. The rival Hearst and de Young families owned two of the three morning newspapers, and five weekly magazines provided a showcase for local writers. With its numerous theaters and urbane attitude, Will Irwin called San Francisco "the gayest, lightest hearted and most pleasure loving city in the western continent."12 16

CARI BEAUCHAMP The Mark Hopkins Art Institute, quickly earning a reputation as one of the finest art schools in the country, became a magnet for society's children, students from the new Leland Stanford University and the University of California and the literary and artistic hopefuls who migrated west seeking kindred spirits in the city that would become known as Baghdad by the Bay. The art institute occupied an entire city block, its castlelike structure standing five stories high, topped by an elaborate tower with a magnificent view of the entire bay. Marion took her classes in the smaller rooms upstairs while the large first-floor salons were used as galleries. The murals on the walls, painted originally for Hopkins by the same Italian artists imported to decorate the saloons and brothels of the Barbary Coast, added a unique dimension to the decor and in the fall and spring, all of society flocked to the art institute's major exhibitions. In her off hours, both with friends and alone, Marion explored the city. She found the Italian area of North Beach provided reasonably priced three-course meals and bottles of table wine for twenty-five cents, and in the saloons and dining halls of the Barbary Coast, the buffet lunch was free when you bought a glass of beer for a nickel. Delmonico's had a downstairs dining room, a second story with rooms for private parties, and a third floor with a discreet row of bedrooms for customers who couldn't or didn't want to go home, but the grandest of all establishments was the Palace Hotel. Built around a courtyard with an interior sparkling with cut glass and marble, it boasted telephones and bathtubs in every room. And from the Ferry Building at the end of Market Street, boats crossed the bay to the small towns of Oakland and Berkeley or over to Marin where Marion sketched Mount Tamalpais and the Pacific Ocean.13 Yet for all the wealth of intellectual stimulation and artistic inspiration, Marion's attention became increasingly focused on her tall, young art teacher. Wesley de Lappe had only recently moved with his parents to San Francisco from Santa Rosa and family pressure to become a serious businessman lessened when he was hired as the art institute's youngest instructor. At five foot two with chestnut hair and deep blue eyes, the pretty, accomplished seventeen-year-old Marion had many admirers. Yet Wesley didn't seem to notice her at all. Determined to catch his attention, Marion selected an outrageous hat covered with huge ostrich feathers for San Francisco's Easter festivities and gave it full credit for finally turning Wesley de Lappe's head. Less than two weeks later, on April 18, 1906, she and Wesley were sitting on a park bench, delaying the inevitable return home, when a loud, rumbling sound was heard throughout San Francisco that was to change their lives and their city forever.14 Streets literally opened up, buildings shook and crumbled. Marion and 17

WITHOUT LYING DOWN Wesley were petrified, but close enough to her home to reconnect with her family and physical safety. Almost every brick chimney in the city fell or was in danger of dropping onto the masses of people as they fled into the streets, screaming helplessly or wandering in quiet shock. Everyone was clutching someone or something: clothes, family silver, irreplaceable photographs, or jewels. For Marion, it was her ostrich feather Easter hat and Wesley de Lappe. As devastating as the initial shock had been—later estimated to be 8.3 on the Richter scale—the fires that followed were what devoured the city. Gaslights crashed to the ground and electric wires short-circuited, sparking blazes everywhere. Water hydrants were useless; the underground pipes had been shattered by the quake. Dynamite blasts vibrated throughout the city as a quarter-mile firebreak was created at Van Ness Avenue. The flames continued for three days and two nights and when they finally burned out, Chinatown, the Barbary Coast, the financial district, and the wooden tenements south of Market were nothing but ashes. More than 1,000 people died, 250 city blocks were devastated, and 300,000 men, women, and children were left homeless. "You have to forget the idea that there was a fire in San Francisco," W R. Hearst wrote. "There was a fire OF San Francisco."15 The impact of the earthquake was not only physical. An atmosphere of equality and community spirit akin to the aftermath of war resulted as tents were pitched in vacant lots and parks and among the ashes of the Nob Hill estates. Debutantes and shopgirls, stockbrokers and beer hall bouncers all lived side by side for months. Children stood in lines several blocks long for free fruit and milk and the Red Cross distributed tins of food. Looters were shot on sight and bottled water became more valuable than gold. Marion would later say that her family "lost everything" in the earthquake, but while their economic security was gone, their house remained standing. The Mark Hopkins Art Institute was obliterated, as was her father's drug company and his warehouses. Len Owens had sold his interest in his advertising firm to concentrate on developing Aetna Springs as a summer resort, but now all available building materials were needed in the city and the economic demands of recovery left few with discretionary income for vacationing.16 Her mother was forced to forfeit any remaining hope of sending Marion to an eastern college. With her school and most vestiges of normalcy gone from the city, marriage became the next logical step, a way for her truly to be on her own. She openly enjoyed Wes's "maulings," as she called their lovemaking, and soon he was convinced that setting a wedding date was his idea. In California a girl under eighteen and a boy under twenty-one had to 18

CARI BEAUCHAMP have parental permission to marry. Though Len Owens was furious that Marion would even consider marrying a poor, nineteen-year-old artist— even though Wes had found work drawing for the San Francisco Chronicle—Minnie had been Marion's age when she married and she resigned herself to her daughter's determination. On Monday, October 21, 1906, Minnie accompanied Marion, Wes, and his father, Russell, to the temporary county offices in a converted house on Sacramento Street to sign the necessary papers for a marriage license. Two days later, Marion's older sister, Maude, recently married to Wilson Bishop, an up-and-coming insurance man, returned home to spend the night with Marion and early the next morning Wes and his sister Amy Belle arrived at the house to pick up Marion and Maude. Unsure of what to wear, Wes had bought four new ties the day before but forgot them all and then lost the ring as well. The girls waited patiently as he ran out to replace them and returned bedecked in his black wool suit, vest, and tie and with a new ring in his pocket, ready, as Marion said, "to be led to the halter." She had arranged for them to be married by her father's former neighbor Reverend Bradford Leavitt, pastor at the first Unitarian Church. Yet as the foursome arrived at the Leavitt house on Jackson just in time for their eleven o'clock appointment, Wes realized that the only money he had left was a twenty-dollar gold piece; he did not want to give Reverend Leavitt more than ten dollars but was too embarrassed to ask for change. So out the door he headed again, down the steps and up the street. Maude ran after him, screaming for him to turn around as there were no stores in that direction. Marion and Amy Belle watched from the porch, laughing and crying at the same time. The temperature was already in the seventies, and when Wes returned with the change, he was perspiring through his heavy clothes. Reverend Leavitt descended the stairs and tried to make the disheveled group comfortable, instructing Amy Belle and Maude to stand behind Wes and Marion, and proceeded with the brief ceremony in his downstairs parlor. As he asked, "Wesley, do you take this woman to be your lawful wedded wife," Marion looked up at Wes and saw what she thought was the "scardest, maddest, and percipitist bridegroom [sic]" she had ever seen and forgot her own whirling emotions for a moment. His forehead covered with sweat, his eyes darting in fear, Wes tried desperately to regain his composure and managed a very faint "Yes, sir." Marion choked over her words as well. When they came to the moment he was to put the ring on her finger, the perspiration reached his eyes and he blindly grasped her hand. "Marion . . . Marion, you . . . thee . . . with this wed . . . ring . . . I thee we . . ." 19

WITHOUT LYING DOWN Reverend Leavitt's smile broke the tension and Marion laughed out loud. Droplets were landing on her hand, but mercifully, the ceremony was over. Looking pale but grinning, Wes went off to work at the Chronicle and Marion, not giving up on all traditions, visited dressmakers to complete her trousseau with a new red suit and a selection of hats. For a honeymoon of sorts, they spent the weekend at a local hotel.17 Marion was selling occasional stories and paintings and Wes's salary at the Chronicle was small but steady, yet economic realities mandated they live with their families. Four days after the brief ceremony, the newlyweds moved in with Wes's parents and sisters on C Street in the Richmond district of San Francisco. After several months of restrained good behavior, Marion realized she had exchanged one set of watching eyes for another and, living with his parents, Wes seemed more of a son than a husband. Familiar with the constraints of sharing a roof with her own relatives, the couple moved in with her family. Frustrated with what she felt were her limitations as a writer and an artist, Marion sought out her old family friend Jack London for advice. "If you expect to write stories pulsing with real life or put upon canvas compositions that are divinely human, you must go forth and live," he told her. "Study human nature by rubbing elbows with the people. Go out and work with them, eat with them, dream with them." Inspired by the dramatic seriousness of his words, Marion tried her hand at a variety of jobs. She pitted peaches at a local cannery until one slipped loose, hitting the woman working next to her on line. Accused of throwing it on purpose, Marion was given her walking papers ten minutes later. She lasted an even shorter time as a telephone operator. Her head throbbed, her arms ached, and her ears rang from the callers' "barbed wire voices." Marion joked that she was fired before she could master any particular situation, but she turned the experiences into short stories and though most of them went unpublished, she consoled herself that she was practicing her art.18 Marion finally found steady employment as the assistant to the acclaimed photographer Arnold Genthe. He had risen to fame and fortune through his informal poses of society matrons and their families, but he also chronicled the streets of San Francisco and was known in Chinatown as "the white man with the camera." Genthe could not help but notice Marion's beauty and she became his model as well. For a Baker's Chocolate advertisement, he posed her with another young dark-haired beauty named Hazel Tharsing, just out of Catholic school. Hazel soon would shed her convent restrictions, change her name to Carlotta Monterey, and eventually marry Eugene O'Neill. 20

CARI BEAUCHAMP The photographer promoted Marion as "one of the ten most beautiful women in America," but she was more comfortable on the other side of the camera. From Genthe she learned the art of layouts and experimented with color film. They discussed the philosophy books he loaned her and he introduced her to Minnie Maddern Fiske and other grandes dames of the stage, who always scheduled photographic sessions with "Ginky" when they visited San Francisco.19 Marion and Wes finally found a small place of their own on Gratton Street near Golden Gate Park, and that meant depending only on each other when it came to the daily minutiae of life. Marion loved to cook and entertain, but planning, shopping for, and preparing dinner on a daily basis were something else again. So was dodging the landlord when the rent was due. And occasionally, Wes would "forget he was married," as Marion politely put it, and stay out all night.20 Wes was unhappy at the Chronicle, where he sketched trials and society matrons, and wanted to devote full time to his art. Marion's work for Genthe was lessening as the photographer began spending more time in Carmel, where Jack London, George Sterling, and other established writers and artists had small homes. With money too often becoming an issue between them, they moved back with Marion's family. In her letters written at the time, Marion is content but clearly in control of the relationship. Her real excitement was saved for her work and she describes her drawings with a passion that is missing when she discusses her marriage. She respected Wes's talent more than she did her own, but knew she was much more ambitious than he. She acknowledged her "marked ability at catching a small likeness of any one I sketched or painted," but considered it "a small skill."21 Wes was becoming renowned for his use of colors, winning prizes and having his paintings published as magazine covers, but the recognition did not transfer into a large income. The romantic notion of two artists eking out an existence to pursue their dreams lost its luster in the reality of living from payday to payday and Wes and Marion agreed to separate. She publicly announced that two artists in one family could "not be a success" and on October 11,1910, he filed for divorce on the grounds of extreme cruelty. When Marion was served with papers, she did not respond. From her own parents' example, divorce was not something to be ashamed of and, since there were no children, she saw the experience as a "youthful indiscretion" and moved on.22 Marion took assignments as a commercial artist for companies like the Western Pacific Railroad. She painted landscapes of the vistas seen from the train, which were used as posters and dining car menu covers. She 21

WITHOUT LYING DOWN wrote poems to accompany the paintings and signed them Marion de Lappe: A magic web, a sylvan dream Where sunlit pale green waters gleam And rocks rise clear to guard the stream Oh the golden Feather River In cloistered canyons soft winds sigh And lavish lights from a summer sky Blue mirrored in the shallows lie Oh the golden Feather River.23

Hoping that writing under deadline would hone her skills, Marion went to work as a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner for fifteen dollars a week. However, her sympathy for victims prevented her from writing flamboyantly enough for William Randolph Hearst's news desk and she was transferred to the theater department. Marie Dressier was billed as "the funniest woman of the English speaking stage," and when one of the most experienced reporters gave Marion the assignment to cover the renowned vaudevillian's opening in Tillies Nightmare in March of 1911, she couldn't believe her good fortune.24 "It's the chance of a lifetime, kid," he told her. "Dressier is news. Get some sketches, a signed interview and they'll give you a spread under Ashton Stevens's review of the play." Almost as an afterthought he added, "Of course, you'll get canned if you come back without them." Taking his word as gospel, Marion joined the throng of reporters at the star's door at the Savoy Theater. Miss Dressier greeted them with "Hi ya, pals," and answered their questions with self-deprecating humor. Marion stood quietly in a corner until the famous comedienne looked directly at her and said, "Hello, little girl, Where'd you come from?" "The Examiner/' Marion replied—to instant silence. Everyone but Marion knew that William Randolph Hearst and Marie Dressier were in the midst of a fierce feud and as the reporters looked back at Marie for a response, she ordered Marion to get out, then turned and stormed to her dressing room, sharply slamming the door. Backstage quickly emptied, but Marion stayed frozen in her corner. Several times during the performance, Marie swept past her looking straight ahead, and when the show was over and the theater dark, the star emerged from her dressing room dressed in her street clothes, a plumed hat, and a fur coat. Marion, still in her same corner, called out, "Miss Dressier, if I don't get this interview, I'll lose my job." 22

CARI BEAUCHAMP Marie stopped, turned, and asked, "Is that what those bastards told you? "Only a top reporter, but he said I'd be made if I got the story and fired if I didn't." Marie shook her head in disbelief and took pity on the girl twenty years younger than she and half her size. "Let's go into my dressing room child and I'll give you the golldarndest interview I ever gave to any reporter." Marie sent her maid to the corner to bring back coffee and "a couple of oyster loaves." Marion started sketching and Marie explained her change of heart. "Child, I couldn't brush aside a young girl struggling to get along. Believe me, I've had some tough breaks myself. Imagine starting out in the theatrical business with a face like mine when beautiful girls are all the vogue. I said to myself, 'You're going to make the whole world laugh at you' and that's exactly what I have done." She had risen to become the star of Tillies Nightmare, running for a year at the Herald Square Theater, in New York and now she was traveling the country in a private train with ten cars and a dining room that never closed. Marion drew and wrote frantically for more than an hour, listening to the laughter that punctuated Marie's stories but sensitive to the sadness that underlay even her funniest tales. They left the theater together and Marie offered her a ride. As Marion started to get out, Marie patted her cheek. "I've always wished I had a daughter," she said, and with a smile added, "I'll see you again."25 Marion ran up the stairs to the Examiner offices, quickly wrote the story, and turned in her drawings. Though Marie wrote Hearst a note the next day that ended their feud shortly thereafter and they remained friends the rest of their lives, at the time it was enough to keep Marion's story out of the paper. It was widely known and respected that she had broken down Dressler's resistance, but the experience increased Marion's self-doubts and her questions about what she was doing.26 San Francisco was almost completely rebuilt and Marion agreed with the visiting Englishwoman Beatrice Webb, who called it a "veritable paradise" for anyone "who wishes to live unto himself without any pressure of law, custom or public opinion." Marion had already seen and accomplished a great deal and enjoyed her reputation as "The Wild Rose of Telegraph Hill" with her artist friends, who valued talent before commerce, but at the age of twenty-two she felt the need to escape. Escape from what or to where, she wasn't sure.27 Then along came a man offering to make the decisions for her. Robert Dickson Pike was a Stanford graduate, a member of the Bohemian Club, 23

WITHOUT LYING DOWN and a rising star at his father's fast-growing steel firm. In many ways, he was the antithesis of what Marion had been seeking for the past five years, yet Robert represented a level of economic security and social acceptance that was very tempting. The deciding factor for Marion was that her father and Robert's traveled in the same circles and her engagement garnered Len's approval like nothing she had accomplished before. And in place of her self-doubts and the often trying challenge of living on her own, Robert told her she was talented and beautiful and made it all seem so easy.28 As Robert Pike's fiancee, Marion officially entered the realm of the society women Arnold Genthe regularly photographed and it was one of his pictures of her, looking out from under a broad-brimmed hat, that appeared as her engagement picture on page one of the San Francisco Call. Marion was labeled a "philosopher, artist and society girl—to say nothing of being pretty" who had "decided between the bountiful life of a comfortable wife and the leanness that often attends the struggles of the ambitious." While the article pointed out she had "achieved more than ordinary success" as an artist and "received flattering offers from the east," Marion claimed, "All of my ambitions are laid aside. This, I hold, is substantial proof that I am truly and unreasonably in love."29 With her final divorce papers signed the week before, Marion's and Robert's families and a few friends gathered at six o'clock on Tuesday evening, November 14, 1911, at the Swedenborgian Church, where once again Reverend Leavitt, under more formal circumstances, performed the marriage ceremony. A reception and dinner followed at the Pikes' luxurious apartments at the Fairmont Hotel. When Marion and Robert became engaged, they intended to spend their honeymoon abroad and live in New York, which, as the papers pointed out, "is so convenient to the capitals and art centers of Europe." But by the time of the wedding, their plans had changed. Business at C. W. Pike's was booming and Charles Pike needed his eldest son in Los Angeles to open a branch office. Charles had assured the East Coast steel and iron companies his firm represented of his ability to sell their products throughout California and Robert promised Marion that after a year or two at most in Los Angeles, they would move permanently to Paris, where she could study art at the Sorbonne.30 It seemed like a reasonable compromise at the time.

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hen Robert and Marion moved into their new home at 2600 Wilshire Boulevard in January of 1912, she stayed busy organizing the house while he opened C. W. Pike's Los Angeles office. The demands of building his father's business kept Robert downtown all day and into the night, and Marion failed to find domestic life particularly satisfying. It had been difficult enough to play the role of society matron in San Francisco where at least there was a society. This Los Angeles was another situation entirely. Los Angeles in 1912 was a sprawling flatland stretching between the ocean and the mountains. Within a thirty-five-mile radius, there were forty incorporated towns, and it was close to impossible to know where one ended and another began. While the southern California land boom of the 1880s had not brought the number of people who swarmed northern California in the Gold Rush, it had induced a variety of characters to seek out the sun and a new life. Families determined to create their own little Utopias bought several hundred or thousands of acres at a time, primarily from the Spanish land grants that still dominated the area, infusing the new communities with their Midwestern values. Pueblos, acres of orange groves, a few hotels, schools, churches, homes, and clusters of businesses were indiscriminately interspersed with lean-to refineries and thousands of wells, the result of the discovery of oil twenty years earlier. The region was tied together by a combination of paved and dirt roads and the Pacific Electric Company's Red Car line, with tracks running from San Fernando down to Newport Beach and from Riverside out to the Pacific Ocean. To fill her hours and satisfy her natural curiosity, Marion rode the Red Car, sitting alongside the tourists, workers, and cargo that depended on it as the only reasonable form of transportation.1 A new and steady outlet for Marion's creativity was provided by the Los Angeles-based producer and theater owner Oliver Morosco. He had gone north to "raid his enemy's territory" in search of actors, costume designers, and artists, and Marion had been recommended by her friend Waldemar 25

WITHOUT LYING DOWN Young, a reporter and grandson of Brigham Young who wrote the "Bits of Color Around the Town" column for the San Francisco Chronicle.2 Morosco looked up Marion upon his return and scanned her portraits of Jack London, boxers Joe Gans and "Gentleman Jim" Corbett, Nob Hill debutantes, and local poets. "This is the kind of stuff I'm looking for," he told her. "They catch the personalities." He offered her the position of personal poster artist for his theater and promised that while "The job may not keep you busy all the time, I'll help you find plenty of work. We've got a booming city if those damned movie outfits seeping in there don't ruin it." When she gave him a questioning look, he explained there were "gangs" all over town "making what we used to call flickers," adding that the more respectable citizens wanted to run them out of town.3 Los Angeles had first been introduced to the "screen machine" in 1896 when the lights were dimmed at the Orpheum and the image of a life - sized Anna Belle Sun danced for a few precious moments, projected onto a large white sheet. Since then, the technology had advanced considerably. Marion had been to the nickelodeons in San Francisco and watched the ten- to fifteen-minute "one reelers" shown between vaudeville acts. She found "the moving pictures" simple and awkward compared to live theater, yet she enjoyed the antics of a little blond girl known as "Goldilocks" and saw nothing at all offensive.4 Anything different was intriguing to Marion and when she went in search of a new home closer to Robert's office and the Morosco Theater on South Broadway, she quickly came face-to-face with what she considered shocking provinciality. There were plenty of vacancy signs, but the small print often read "No dogs or actors allowed" or "No jews, actors or dogs." The bigotry appalled her and her resentment was compounded as she faced a barrage of questions at each door: "Do you live alone? Can you pay a month in advance? Are you in the flicks?" "No, I am an artist," stated Marion proudly, but the distinction was not so clear to the inquiring proprietors. After several defeats, Marion rented a furnished home by telling the landlord her husband was a businessman and she was a seamstress; the easel she was moving in was to stretch and measure material.5 Yet if she found her new fellow townsfolk boorish, she was immediately comfortable at the theater. Oliver Morosco described his stock company as "one big happy family," and she quickly became friends with fellow San Franciscans Lewis Stone and Bert Lytell and a sweet, husky boy who looked more like a college football tackle than a rising star, Robert Z. Leonard. She adored the tall comedienne Charlotte Greenwood brought out to star in So 26

CARI BEAUCHAMP Long Letty but Marion was a bit taken aback by the regal reserve of Morosco's newest star, Laurette Taylor. Other members of the company were deferential to Morosco, but after reading the play, Marion walked right up to him and said earnestly, "Surely you aren't going to put on an old wheeze like Peg o My Heart. Not after doing Shaw and Ibsen. It's 'Cinderella right out of the Dog Pound.' " Morosco warned Marion that it was a big success in New York and added, "Don't you dare make any criticism about it to Miss Taylor. The play was written by her new husband." Laurette Taylor took the role of the young ingenue to heart and Marion's job was to paint the essence of the character and, she reminded herself, not the lines of age that were already showing on the still beautiful actress who posed in front of her.6 Peg o My Heart was a smash, playing for a over a year, and with his profits, Morosco expanded his empire by importing the New York actress Kitty Gordon, nationally proclaimed as having "the most beautiful back in America." Marion's painting conspicuously featured Kitty's famous asset, posing her glancing over her dazzling shoulders and down her bare back in a gown ending in a V at the waist. Morosco loved it, but when the lithographs went up, they were almost instantly vandalized. Letters protesting the poster poured into the newspapers and flyers were distributed in front of the theater. We must protect our innocent little children from seeing such obscene pictures of half-nude women. And we must keep them away from the evil influence of the nickelodeons and these lawless people who have forced themselves upon our beautiful city to make what they call movies. Only if we all unite can we drive them out.

It was signed "Conscientious Citizens."7 The leaflets piqued Marion's curiosity and she goaded a Morosco actor, Jimmy Gleason, into attending a "Conscientious Citizens" meeting with her. They were greeted by a "bilious little man" announcing they were already a third of the way to their goal of 10,000 signatures on petitions "to rid our city of these hoodlums." He introduced "the groups that are working the hardest to bring about this emancipation," and hotel owners and restauranteurs rose to promise not to allow anyone connected with the movies into their premises. A clubwoman explained why "legitimate" actors from the theater were different from these new hordes that cursed the city: "Stage folks keep their actions hidden behind closed doors, while those 'flicker people,' with their painted faces, perform shamelessly right out in the open."8 Marion and Jimmy were so offended by the small-mindedness of the gathering, they dubbed them "The Constipated Citizens," yet they too had 27

WITHOUT LYING DOWN seen cameras, men with megaphones, and costumed actors all over town. Fires or police chases of any kind were fair game to be used as backdrops, as were horse races, sporting events, and parades. The participants were referred to as "movies" and Agnes de Mille remembered, "They were really outcasts. The Keystone cops would take over a street and do what they had to do before the real police arrived. It was fun, but it was socially unacceptable. I knew what racial discrimination was because I was a 'movie/ "9 Even when The Los Angeles Times editorialized about the economic benefits of the new business, they acknowledged the problem: "The motion picture people may be something of a pest, but their value to the community as national and international advertisers is inestimable."10 Robert's innate sense of respectability made him side with the Conscientious Citizens and Marion would later recall her second husband as being "years older," even though he was only three years her senior. He spent his days in a conservative business milieu and the "differences in our social instincts" became all the more apparent. He "felt uncomfortable with my artist and writer friends and wanted us to live a formal mid-Victorian existence."11 What had once looked liberating from the position of the working wife of a poor artist now became confining. Marion was coming to terms with the fact she would never be happy as a society wife and that she worked because she wanted to, yet she managed to postpone most immediate conflicts with Robert because they spent so little time together. He was busy working and traveling and when Marion wasn't painting or at the theater, she took to studying the history of the region. One of her favorite weekend haunts was the historic plaza designed 150 years earlier by the original Franciscan Mission settlement for the founding population of thirty-two people. The narrow cobbled streets that led from the plaza were sheltered by pepper trees and oleanders and on Sundays, devout Catholics and tourists mixed with the Mexican families who lived in the nearby adobes.12 One Sunday afternoon in early 1914, Marion looked up from the bench where she sat sketching Mexican children at play to see a tall, hefty woman in a broad-brimmed hat and an unflattering, boldly printed dress walking out of one of the small shops, carrying a bag of popcorn. Marion watched as she tossed the popcorn to the pigeons and listened as the woman conversed with the birds, ordering them not to be so greedy. Then Marion's heart gave a little leap as she realized the woman was Marie Dressier. Instinctively, she stood up, but immediately sat back down, sure that the famous actress would not remember "a silly young reporter." Marion started to make a quick sketch, but Marie headed toward her as she emptied the popcorn bag onto the ground. 28

CARI BEAUCHAMP "I'm not really off my trolley," she said, glancing up from under her hat at Marion, the only person sitting nearby. "I like birds. I talk to them. I have an old parrot, a regular ..." As Marion stealthily slipped the drawing back into the pad, Marie stopped short. "Say, aren't you the girl who interviewed me in San Francisco four or five years ago?" Marion rose again as she said, "Yes, Miss Dressier, but I didn't dream you'd remember me." "I'm not the forgetting type. I've often wondered what became of you. Hate to lose track of anybody I take a fancy to." Relaxing Marion with her easy charm, Marie reached out her hand and suggested they go into "one of these little Mexican joints and have a tamale." Marion's familiarity with the area gave her the confidence to suggest Sefiora Martinez's El Pajaro restaurant around the corner. Four tables filled the small adobe dining room, and Marie was impressed when Marion was welcomed like family by the owner and ordered for both of them in Spanish. The feeling of comfortable informality quickly fell over the two women just as it had that night long ago in San Francisco.13 Marion talked about her work for Morosco and her second husband and Marie said she too had left an early unhappy marriage and spoke of her childhood in Cobourg, Canada. She was born Leila Maria Koerber and by the time she was ten, she was larger than her fifteen-year-old sister and so responsible she considered herself as "born older." Marie adored her "frail little mother," who, "gentle as she was, had courage enough to stand between me and my father. He was a tyrannical German musician who worshipped beauty and couldn't forgive me for being such a mudhen."14 Marie was in Los Angeles to film Tillies Punctured Romance for Mack Sennett at his Keystone studio in Edendale, and her supporting players were Mabel Normand, a girl "with a complexion that makes you think of gardenias," and a new rising star, Charlie Chaplin. The English comic had just signed with Keystone after being discovered as he toured America with Fred Karno's burlesque troop. Marie had first met Mack Sennett when she was an established comedienne and he, working in a Connecticut iron foundry, sought her advice on how to break into show business. With her help he became an actor for David Wark Griffith, and rumor had it that his mentor was now working on a film of epic proportions. Mack was inspired to try something similar and, never forgetting Marie's early guidance, signed her for the remarkable sum of $2,500 a week to create his first six-reel comedy.15 Marie entranced Marion with tales of making movies, comparing the process to "sitting in the middle of a cement mixer." She thought a pretty 29

WITHOUT LYING DOWN girl had an easier time of it and asked if she had considered "going into the movies?" "Do they use artists?" "I mean to play in them. Be an actress. You've got the looks." Marion laughed at the thought, claiming she couldn't act "even if Svengali hypnotized me," but admitted she would love to do more portraits of the actors. "Come on out to the studio anytime and ask for me. I'll be happy to tote you around." The sun was setting over the plaza as they left the restaurant, basking in the warmth of an easy friendship. Marie reminded her of what she had said in San Francisco years before. This time, Marion was secure in the knowledge that the phrase "I'll see you again" was a fact, not just a hope. "I'll be repeating that promise if you come to the studio in about a week; our company will be in full swing by then and I'll introduce you to Chaplin."16 But weeks passed before Marion was free to venture out to Edendale. Because painting for Morosco was intermittent, she had arranged to be on call for an advertising firm and they suddenly were in need of several commercial layouts with immediate deadlines. When she finally arrived at the Sennett studio and asked for Miss Dressier, the guard informed her "Punctured is in the can. She left for New York yesterday." Until she was turned away, Marion had not realized how much she was looking forward to being on the lot, if only for an afternoon. Just being at the gates of the studio electrified her with excitement. Then, within days of this disappointment, Oliver Morosco told her that because the cost of lithographing had recently tripled, he could not rationalize keeping her on salary.17 At twenty-five, Marion had already developed the philosophy to "take failure with my chin up and success, when it comes, in stride." She took this news as a minor setback and leased a fourth-floor studio at 315 Broadway, sharing the rent with fellow illustrator Hilda Hasse. Marion turned to working full-time for advertising men, whom she found "deadly serious and content in their narrow world," and tried to lace her layouts selling bunion removers and pickles with charm and sex appeal. In her boredom, her dissatisfaction with Robert increased, but she refused to entertain the thought of returning to San Francisco; her ambition remained intact and she was confident that Los Angeles was where she belonged.18 Marion spent many of her evenings with the woman who was becoming her best friend in Los Angeles, Adela Rogers. They had first met in San Francisco shortly after the earthquake, when the teenage Adela came to town with her father, one of the country's most famous defense attorneys. Adela's parents separated when she was still a child and with the exception of a few months at the Convent of Notre Dame in Santa Clara and 30

CARI BEAUCHAMP traveling in Europe with her aunt and uncle, Adela had been raised and educated by tutors, her father, and her grandparents. She disdained her mother and worshipped her father, who involved her in his cases and took her with him in his travels. Adela adored San Francisco and would always claim she was from there because "it sounded much more glamorous and literary" than Los Angeles.19 Being Earl Rogers's daughter was a role Adela took seriously. In fact, she always assumed she would be a lawyer, but a brief foray into acting led her astray as far as Earl was concerned and he introduced her to William Randolph Hearst. The publisher hired her at the age of eighteen as a cub reporter for his Los Angeles Herald Examiner, where she thrived, using her natural curiosity as well as the investigative techniques and storytelling abilities she had learned at her father's knee. Marion had been raised to think independently and to be relatively selfsufficient, but she paled in comparison to Adela. Marion was several years older and she knew Adela well enough to see her insecurities, but Adela conducted herself with such an aura of sureness that she was always the one in charge. With opinions on absolutely everything, she was a close friend and an authority figure at the same time. Yet she put Marion on a bit of a pedestal as well. She had been impressed and just a little threatened when Earl Rogers pronounced upon meeting Marion for the first time, "That girl has genius. She'll do something."20 The two women were occasionally joined by the stars Adela met through reporting and the Keystone comedienne Mabel Normand became a favorite companion. They ventured out to the Vernon Country Club, the closest thing to the Barbary Coast south of the Tahatchapis, where Adela would drink creme de menthe, Marion a weak scotch, and Mabel whiskey "with apricot brandy added to kill the taste." They danced until all hours and then crawled back into town, sometimes going straight to work or catching a quick nap at Mabel's apartment at Seventh and Figueroa.21 Adela was also spending time with the Herald Examiner's tall, goodlooking copy editor Ike St. Johns, but many nights she, Marion, and an eclectic group of friends gathered at Ivy's, Al Levy's at Third and Main, or the Ship Cafe down on the Venice pier. The regulars included Eric von Stroheim, a young man who claimed to have his fortune tied up in Europe so "he lived meagerly off what he could borrow from the rest of us." Marion tolerated him because he was a friend of Adela's and found "his stories amusing, his lies preposterous and he entertained us, even though we didn't think he had a chance to succeed." They also enjoyed the company of Sessue Hayakawa and Tsuru Aoki, whom Marion had known and liked at St. Margaret's Hall. The couple 31

WITHOUT LYING DOWN were engaged to be married and determined to be successful actors, so when Tsuru was cast in The Geisha along with their friend Frank Borzage, one of the few actors they knew who worked regularly, Adela convinced him to put in a word for Sessue with the director Thomas Ince.22 Marion and Adela went together to watch The Geisha being filmed one afternoon at "Inceville," the massive strip of land off Sunset bordering on the Pacific Ocean where film could be shot on the beach and in the mountains on the same day. Adela was "a walkie-talkie encyclopedia of intellectual and casual information" on the people and the techniques they were using, and Marion soaked it all in. She stayed in touch with her friends from the Morosco Theater, missing the regular contact with the personalities, the gossip, and the warring factions, all in equal measure. Few of the actors, excepting Charlotte Greenwood and Bob Leonard, who had just "deserted" to act and direct at Universal, expressed any desire or even willingness to perform in front of the camera. Enticing as the money was, flickers were still looked down on by everyone who considered themselves serious actors. Jimmy Gleason avoided the temptation by writing a play that was to be produced in New York, and a farewell gathering was quickly arranged. Among the familiar faces at Jimmy's party were several "movies" and Marion was introduced to Owen Moore. She knew he and his older brothers, Matt and Tom, had been acting since their teens and that Owen was married to Mary Pickford, known as the "girl with the golden curls." Variety had started reporting on motion pictures as early as 1907 and newspapers created sections for reviews soon after. But the boom in moviegoing had resulted in new magazines such as Moving Picture World and Photoplay, a lavishly colored monthly selling for fifteen cents a copy. With features like "Who's Who in the Photoplays," word quickly spread that the favorite known as "Goldilocks" or "Little Mary" had a full name; it was Mary Pickford and Frances had already noticed "the quality of her films were above the rest."23 A slight man about five feet ten inches, with deep blue eyes and dark hair slicked straight back, Owen struck Marion as almost too handsome. "He overworked the affected charm and mannerism of the professional Irishman, but in a gush of enthusiasm I told him how clever I thought Miss Pickford was." "Mary has an expressive little talent," Owen responded. "Hardly what one could call cerebral." Star or butcher, Marion could not abide any husband's talking about his wife that way. Controlling herself, she smiled and walked away, but Owen gave her a moment to cool down and followed her to the punch bowl. 32

CARI BEAUCHAMP "Can't you women learn to fortify yourselves against the truth, or do we always have to lie to you? Would I have seemed more gallant had I endowed Mary with a greater talent than Sarah Bernhardt?" As Marion was debating whether to turn away again, he asked her if she would like him to arrange a meeting with Mary. Her anger changed to interest, particularly when he added, "Charlotte Greenwood tells me you do fine portraits. Take some of your work along and maybe you can do one of Mary." The party was breaking up and Marion said her good-byes. She was excited at the possibility of meeting Mary Pickford and thought Owen Moore "was a very attractive Lothario, if only he hadn't made that snide remark about his wife's talent."24 Although three years younger than Marion, Mary Pickford was old beyond her years. She had been the family breadwinner since the age of eight, playing in stage roles with stock companies that took her away from her native Toronto and her widowed mother; sister Lottie, and brother Jack for months at a time. She was all of fifteen in the summer of 1907 when she determined to make a career in New York. Sleeping on a friend's chair and paying the "rent" by shopping and cleaning, she saved every penny she could to send home. Blindly ambitious, she bombarded the preeminent producer David Belasco with letters and photographs of herself and won the role of young Betty in his production of The Warrens of Virginia, written by William de Mille and costarring his younger brother, Cecil.25 It was Belasco who decided that Gladys Smith needed a new stage name and together they reviewed her family tree for one with marquee value. They stopped at her maternal grandfather, Jack Pickford Hennessey, and she proudly wired her mother, "Gladys Smith now Mary Pickford engaged by David Belasco to appear on Broadway this fall." She never looked back and she was never a child again. As if to underscore their dedication to her future, the rest of the family adopted the name Pickford as well.26 Mary had done little but work since then, and with her mother's constant guidance, negotiated increases in pay with each new studio and contract. Insulated in her family and films, Mary had little time for friends, excepting the fatherless Gish sisters, with whom the family shared rooms in New York during the offseason. But that spring of 1914 when Owen mentioned a woman who was an excellent portrait painter and someone he thought she would like, Mary was willing to make the time. Still, it had to be at the studio so she could cut the interview short if she wanted. Marion was not about to repeat the mistake she had made when she missed Marie Dressier. As soon as she was summoned, she dropped every33

WITHOUT LYING DOWN thing and prepared for her audience, but that morning the Santa Ana winds were blowing hard, making it impossible to carry her portfolio. If she was to be on time, she had to leave her pictures at home. A young man met Marion at the studio entrance and walked her through the dirt lot until he knocked at the door of a wooden building. A voice called out for them to enter and there in a darkened room stood Mary Pickford editing film with the cutter. She greeted Marion with a smile and a firm handshake and took her into a side room to talk. Marion's first reaction to Mary was to sense "a strange watchfulness behind her steadfast gaze." She was surprised at the vulnerability from someone she had put on a pedestal and she instantly developed a fiercely protective attitude toward Mary that was to be a hallmark of their friendship.27 Their shared sense of ambition united them immediately and although Mary was initially more reticent than Marion, they quickly established a shared sense of failure in their respective marriages as well. They had both married for the first time a few months short of their eighteenth birthday, and while Mary had seen more than most people twice her age, she had lived a very sheltered and disciplined life; nothing had prepared her for the first time Owen Moore put his arm around her. The physical sensations she felt were entirely new to her and she was swept off her feet. Moore was seven years older, known as a man about town and, perhaps most offensive of all to her mother, Charlotte, "a five-dollar-a-day actor." Yet when he threatened to leave her if she didn't marry him, they secretly wed in January 1911 and hid the fact from her mother for several months.28 When their relationship was written about in the press, it was all romance, sweetness, and fluff. Reality was a very different picture. Owen and Mary had their own apartment for a while, but Mary had no experience in relationships and, growing up on trains and in boardinghouses, knew even less about domestic skills. And her mother was always there; in their home, at the studio, and even traveling with them. Charlotte would check in to the suite, point to one bedroom, and announce with authority, "You take that room Owen. Mary and I will sleep in here." Mary's star was rising and Owen's, if not descending, was standing still and his drinking did not help matters. All these factors, combined with different shooting schedules, gave the marriage little chance at all.29 In the fall of 1913, Mary was hospitalized with what some biographers claim were internal injuries incurred when, following the script, she carried a much larger girl from a burning schoolhouse. Mary herself would later refer to her condition as a ruptured appendix and the November issue of Photoplay reported that she was "convalescing rapidly" from "a serious attack of appendicitis." But others ascertained that Mary was suffering 34

CARI BEAUCHAMP from the afteraffects of an abortion performed in a New York hospital. Whatever the actual cause for her hospitalization, Mary was never able to have children.30 By January of 1914, Mary was well enough to travel to California and resume filming. The press reported that "poor Tittle Mary' still looks awfully tiny and thin," but by the next month they were "wishing that Tittle Mary's' health will continue to improve and that no more horrid operations will have to be performed or horrid medicines taken," a stiletto jab if she had had an abortion.31 She looked wonderful to Marion when they first met only a few months later and she was relieved that Mary was not at all concerned that she had been unable to bring her portfolio. After over an hour of comfortable conversation, Mary assured her there would be plenty of time for portrait painting when she returned from New York in the fall. As Marion left the studio, the young man at the gate commented on his amazement that "Miss Pickford spent so much time" with her and she felt exhilarated. In a short few months, Marion had seen Marie Dressier again, been to Inceville, and met Mary Pickford. She was convinced fate was playing a hand and was more determined than ever to find work in "the movies." Marie had offered to help, but she was in New York and Marion's mind raced to think of who else would have suggestions. Adela Rogers would know. Only the week before she had seen Adela at the Alexandria Hotel lunching with Lois Weber. While there were a good dozen women directors working in Los Angeles, Lois Weber at the age of thirty-two was the best known, most respected, and highest paid; it had just been announced that she had signed a $50,000-a-year contract. As Marion left the hotel, she noticed Adela waving, but not wanting to interrupt, she smiled and walked out the door.32 The next day, Adela told her Lois Weber had wanted to meet her. "She's always on the look out for new faces and you're the refined type that appeals to her." Marion laughed out loud at the thought, but what days before had seemed like a ludicrous idea now struck her as a logical possibility, and she asked Adela to set up an appointment with the director.33 Lois Weber had a reputation for supporting other women, and encouraged actresses such as Gene Gauntier, Cleo Madison, and Dorothy Davenport to direct. Lois also had a sense of purpose that went beyond the creative spirit that drew others to the business. As a child in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, she studied music and toured as a concert pianist until a piano key broke during a recital and she lost all nerve to play in front of an audience. Working as a Church Home Missionary in the poorer sections of Pittsburgh, she was frustrated by the 35

WITHOUT LYING DOWN seeming futility of one-on-one conversions and her uncle advised her to take up acting. "As I was convinced the theatrical profession needed a missionary, he suggested that the best way to reach them was to become one of them so I went on the stage filled with a great desire to convert my fellowman."34 Joining a Chicago stock company, she soon married their star actor and stage manager Phillips Smalley, the good-looking grandson of Oliver Wendell Holmes. Lois's acting was praised for "radiating domesticity" and critics claimed she was "at her best playing the young matron," but when she left the company to keep house for Phillips, she soon tired of not working and found a job with the Gaumont film company, where she was encouraged to write, act, and try her hand at directing. Her husband soon joined her and they quickly established themselves as codirectors, with Lois writing all the stories and acting in many of them.35 They moved between a series of studios before signing with Universal in Los Angeles, where Lois became known for her sophisticated camera angles and split-screen techniques. Universal supported the Smalleys with budgets that allowed for such luxuries as paying $1,200 for a small island that they then blew up for cinematic effect, yet they felt constrained by the demand for two two-reel films a month and the perceived "envious eyes" of their coworkers. Phillips particularly courted the attention of the press and Jean Darnell's "Studio Chat" column in Photoplay barely let a month go by without mentioning the couple.36 In April of 1914 Lois and Phillips spent a month filming in Laguna Beach, where they met Hobart Bosworth, a respected Broadway actor whose tuberculosis had driven him to seek California's recuperative climate. He had reluctantly become a motion picture actor five years earlier when offered $125 to star in The Power of the Sultan for Selig, filmed at a Chinese laundry because the backdrops could be hung on the clotheslines. He moved on to producing his own films and, an ardent Jack London fan, he wrote, directed, and starred in The Sea Wolf, a seven-reel film made for $9,000. With the $4 million in profits it brought in, he created his own studio.37 Bosworth's conversations with Lois and Phillips turned to their desire to make films of whatever length and subject they chose and he invited them to work with him. Wide distribution of their films would be assured as he was in the process of joining forces with Famous Players and Jesse Lasky to form Paramount Pictures.38 By early summer of 1914, the Smalleys were at the Bosworth studios and Lois was directing her first film. When Marion arrived for her appointment, she was ushered past actors re-creating the French Revolution and into an office to be introduced to "a tall woman, with classical features. She 36

CARI BEAUCHAMP seemed to glide rather than walk, her head held high and tilted slightly backward, her ample breasts preceding her well-corseted body." Marion thought she most closely resembled a figurehead on a sailing ship.39 As Lois sat behind a large desk and looked through Marion's portfolio of drawings, she began the conversation by telling Marion how much she enjoyed finding new talent. Marion "told her how much I wanted to design costumes and sets in a movie studio" and their shared love of filmmaking permeated their discussion. Yet when Lois asked, "Would you like to come under my wing as one of my little starlets?" Marion was not sure she understood. She reiterated that her experience was as an artist and a writer; she was interested in working "on the dark side of the camera."40 Lois assured her that at most studios, and at Bosworth in particular, everyone did a little of everything. She was offering her a position as her assistant and protegee where she would work in every stage of production, including in front of the camera. When the director said, "I'm sure we can match whatever salary you are making now" and then asked, "How soon can you start?" Marion knew she had found a new home. Lois was cognizant that she was hiring more than a bright and talented young woman; she was also ensuring a connection with a close friend of Adela Rogers, the rising star reporter of the Los Angeles Herald. And while this was a greater entree into the world of filmmaking than Marion had dreamed possible, there were compromises to be made. She was to be listed on the studio books as an actress and with a new name. A few months short of her twenty-sixth birthday, Marion Benson Owens de Lappe Pike signed her contract with Bosworth Inc. as "Frances Marion, Actress, Refined type, age 19."41

37

Qhapter 3

T

he Bosworth complex on Occidental was, for its time, state of the art. It had been built from the ground up as a year-round studio, in contrast to the many other companies that used vacant buildings on the empty lots during the winter months. (The term "shooting on the lot" came about because that is exactly what they were doing.) The executive office building was two stories of steel and concrete and housed the accounting department, scenario writers, and editors. A theater was attached to the laboratory where thousands of feet of film were printed each day. There was a carpenter's shop and a huge property room with a door designed so trucks could load up the sets and roll them directly onto the stage, A glass roof opened or was covered with canvas to allow for ventilation and a release of the intense heat from the lights that plagued other studios.1 Lois Weber was in the middle of Traitor when Frances started working at Bosworth. She did whatever needed doing: writing press releases, moving furniture on the sets, painting backgrounds, and mastering the art of cutting film. She learned to respect continuity and ensure that the same prop was held in the same hand when scenes were shot out of sequence. One of her first friends at Bosworth was a young man with a similar sense of responsibility, a fellow San Franciscan named Sidney Franklin, and Frances said, "No one would have been surprised to see us sweeping the floor."2 Bosworth's cameraman George Hill, the first cinematographer to see his name on the screen in the credits for The Sea Wolf, became enamored of Frances. He was tall, good-looking, and seven years younger than she, but Frances was not about to enter a serious relationship. Robert was spending more of his time in San Francisco and she was practically living at the studio so it was easy to postpone dealing with their failing marriage.3 In addition to her role as Lois's assistant, Frances appeared in front of the camera, but for a reason she found acceptable: the sophistication of the moviegoing audiences was growing and word was filtering back that it was not only the deaf who read lips. Extras were being caught in conversations totally unrelated to the action, and with Lois's zeal for detail, she asked 38

CARI BEAUCHAMP Frances to write pertinent lines of dialogue for the extras to say and then work among them in costume. Dressed as "a gypsy, barmaid, nun, prisoner and slut," she consoled herself with the knowledge that she was actually writing for films, even if it was mostly one-liners. Her every skill and experience were called upon, including horseback riding when she doubled for the star Winifred Kingston in Captain Courtesy, an action-packed "Robin Hood in early California" five-reeler. And when Lois asked her to create a stage name for her newest "starlet" from Kansas, Olga Kronk, she "suggested 'Claire' because she was a natural blonde with delicate features and light complexion and 'Windsor' because she suggested aristocracy." Frances worked longer hours for less pay than she ever dreamed she would, loving most of it and continuously learning.4 While other directors simply attached themselves to outdoor events, Lois approached the owners of lavish residences in respectable neighborhoods and arranged to "rent" their homes for a few days. These realistic backgrounds added authenticity and saved the company time and money by not having to create their own scenery, yet filming this way required that all the action set against that background be completed at one time, often out of sequence.5 Frances developed a deep respect for Lois Weber's abilities and a fierce loyalty to her. The responsibilities Lois took on were daunting to say the least; directing, producing, writing, casting, editing, and acting, all with a determination and a dedication that went beyond mere work ethic. Although Frances was almost "irreligious," she and Lois shared a strong compassion for the abused underdog. Ardent in her beliefs, Lois was often mistakenly taken to be a Christian fundamentalist, but she was more of a libertarian, opposing censorship and the death penalty and championing birth control. The need for a strong, loving, and nurturing home was clearly promoted as well and if there was a single maxim that underlay each film it was that selfishness and egocentricity erode the individual and the community. Many of the films she made at Universal focused on a moral topic, such as prejudice in The Jew's Christmas, and wife beating in His Brand, but it was at Bosworth that she became known for her "Big Theme" films. Hypocrites, a four-reel allegorical drama that Lois wrote and directed soon after Frances arrived at Bosworth, was the most controversial and, not incidentally, the most profitable. The recurring presence of "Truth," portrayed as a naked woman, provoked a censorship debate and massive press coverage, but when it was eventually released throughout the country, her fame was cemented. "After seeing Hypocrites," said Variety, "you can't forget the name of Lois Weber."6 To Frances's surprise and pleasure, the studio was expanded to include Oliver Morosco. In spite of his protestations against the flickers only a few 39

WITHOUT LYING DOWN years before, it was a natural business move to turn his repertoire of plays into films. Charlotte Greenwood came with him and having the comedienne around the studio added to the fun. In the three years she had been in Los Angeles, Frances had witnessed significant changes. There were now dozens of studios and their ripple effect on the local economy could no longer be ignored. While there were still occasional outbursts from the righteous, most of the former "Constipated Citizens" were too busy counting their money to object further. The Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce proudly announced that over 15,000 locals "were supported by the industry" that brought over $15 million to the area. Hotels were booming, restaurants were packed, and new neighborhoods were popping up where only sagebrush had thrived before.7 New talent was always being sought and Elsie Janis, a popular young vaudevillian and Broadway comedy star famous for her impersonations, arrived at the Bosworth studios in the fall of 1914. She had been headlining at the Palace Theatre in London, but along with many other Americans visiting overseas, returned to the States when the European war broke out. Elsie made four films in four months at Bosworth and while she and Frances became friends immediately, it was harder to warm up to Elsie's mother, Josephine. Insisting everyone call her Ma, she rarely left her daughter's side and, in a voice that reminded Frances of a honking goose, had her say about everything, including sets, costumes, and casts. But soon Frances saw that while some people were afraid of her or even actively disliked her, Ma was quietly generous and thoughtful to the extras, dressmakers, and musicians—people from whom reciprocity was impossible in any way except through gratitude and devotion.8 Ma Janis decided that refined type or not, Frances should be cast as one of the cave women in 'Twas Ever Thus. They trooped out to Chats worth Park, thirty miles north of Los Angles, to film, and with Elsie playing "Lithesome" and titles that read, "Fearless women of the Stone Age who fought and died alongside their men," Frances was grateful that her small part called for her face to be covered with mud.9 Elsie was drawn to Frances's ribald sense of humor and encouraged her to help write her comedies. Elsie made light of the work, but she openly depended on the discipline of people like Frances and Sidney Franklin, whom Elsie took to calling "George Detail" because he followed her around the set saying, "You had your handkerchief in your left hand in the last shot, Miss Janis."10 Owen Moore was hired to play opposite Elsie and Frances was appalled as she watched the young extras clamoring to be in scenes with him. He intimated to Elsie that his marriage was virtually over, but when Mary Pick40

CARI BEAUCHAMP ford returned to California in November and caught them holding hands on the set, she was furious. Mary had known Elsie since they played Shea's Theater in Toronto together as children in 1899, but she didn't trust her with her husband. Mary continued to drop by often to keep an eye on Owen and she and Frances began to solidify their friendship.11 In January of 1915, Elsie returned to London to entertain the English troops and Hobart Bos worth left the company that bore his name. He had been ill for several months and the doctors warned him that without complete rest, his tuberculosis might return. The press reported that Lois Weber and Phillips Smalley "were not happy" at the studio without Bosworth and in early April they met with Carl Laemmle, the president of Universal, who was in town for the official opening of his new, sprawling Universal City.12 The Smalleys returned to Universal with the assurance that they would be producing multireel "feature pictures," a concession for Laemmle who was devoted to shorter films. He claimed long features were doomed because "every exhibitor I talk to will be only too glad when they come back to one or two reels and once in a while a three reel feature." In spite of the success of The Sea Wolf and the Italian film Quo Vadisl Laemmle's attitude was shared by many, including William Selig, who was adamant that "the single reel photo drama is the keystone of the motion picture industry." Universal would continued to produce two-reelers into the twenties, but even their most dogmatic supporters had their assumptions challenged on February 8, 1915, with the premiere of D. W. Griffith's The Clansman.13 Soon to be known by its subtitle, "The Birth of a Nation," The Clansman provoked so much discussion because of its length, epic scope, and photography, as well as its controversial storyline, that it became a "must see" even for people who had never been to a movie theater before. To those who worked in the business, any residual tendency to apologize for their profession vanished. The film brought a sense of collective pride and accomplishment and suggested a new level of potential for creative fulfillment. Frances was among the multitude swept away with enthusiasm for the grandeur of The Clansman, yet as sure as she was of her love of moviemaking, she was still unclear as to how she fit in. Lois Weber offered to take her with her to Universal, but Frances decided it was time to strike out on her own. She received an offer from the two-year-old Balboa studio in Long Beach, which was expanding its writing department and turning to women in its search for new talent.14 She understood why there were so many successful women writers; it was a creative outlet achieved in private and required relatively little bravado. Women's novels were best-sellers, short stories by women filled 41

WITHOUT LYING DOWN popular magazines, and women writers were commonplace in the film industry. Yet no one knew the exact number because many stories were mailed directly to the film companies and a ten- or twenty-five-dollar check was sent back with a receipt and a release form. Seldom was there a writer's credit on the screen. Alice Guy Blache had started as a secretary for Gaumont in Paris and risen to be a successful director at Solax in New Jersey. While acknowledging "strong prejudice" still existed, she claimed that "there is nothing connected with the staging of a motion picture that a woman cannot do as easily as a man." Movie magazines ran scenario contests and writing advice columns. A scenario writer for Essanay in Chicago, one Louella O. Parsons, had just published How to Write for the Movies and it was selling briskly at a dollar a copy. Scenario writing was touted as "a new profession for women" and Marguerite Bertsch, Daisy Smith, Catherine Carr, and Josephine Recot were highlighted in the press as names to watch. In fact, women were at every level of moviemaking, but an important reason they were welcomed and appreciated and even occasionally nurtured and promoted from within was that movies were not taken seriously as a business.15 Yet once Frances was ensconced at Balboa, she found "the promise of a writing job was as empty as a blown egg." She was paid all right—to play minor roles in westerns and costume dramas. She couldn't understand it. When she watched herself on the screen, she saw "a tall, gawky girl whose waving arms looked like two busy windmills, a stranger who made a few grimaces and then dashed off again." Her only solace was the new friends she was making, especially another scenario writer, Bess Meredyth.16 Bess had been precociously enterprising as a young girl in her hometown of Buffalo, New York, where her father managed a local theater. Born Helen Elizabeth MacGlashin, she became a talented pianist in her teens and spent a year with several maiden aunts in Detroit. Her parents were pleased with her musical accomplishments, but horrified when one of the aunts began touring with a group known as The Ladies Whistling Chorus. The red-headed, vivacious Bess returned to Buffalo to play concert piano, but discovered her true metier by winning a writing contest sponsored by the local newspaper. She was paid a dollar for each of her daily columns and after what she called a marriage that lasted "five and a half minutes" she took her savings and set out on a national concert tour.17 Arriving in Los Angeles in the winter of 1911, Bess found work as an extra with Biograph and took the stage name of Meredyth from her family tree. She realized she could make more money if she wrote scenarios in addition to acting and jumped between assignments for several studios, churning out one-reelers, serials, and action dramas.

42

CARI BEAUCHAMP Bess and Frances shared a strong sense of humor and fierce ambition. Both women viewed their earliest marriages as minor indiscretions, but Frances felt a pang of jealousy over Bess's freedom, living alone in a bungalow at the foot of the Hollywood hills, surrounded by her dogs, with a room of her own to write in. Engaged to Wilfred Lucas, a young actor and director with whom she shared her passion for films, Bess seemed so confident that the next job would always be right around the corner.18 And it didn't help when Frances visited Universal and Lois Weber chided her for not coming with her. Her Morosco friends Lon Chaney and Bob Leonard were there as well as Hobart Bosworth, sufficiently recovered to act in films and free from the burdens of running his own studio. It seemed that everyone but Frances was sure of the path they were taking.19 Suffering from professional self-doubt only intensified Frances's awareness of how little she had in common with Robert. They had hardly seen each other over the past year since his father closed his Los Angeles office in 1914. Robert returned to San Francisco and they both admitted there was no reason to keep up the pretense of a relationship. Claiming responsibility for the failure of her marriage, Frances refused any financial settlement. She told herself she should have known better than to marry someone to whom society and respectability were so consequential. Although her San Francisco roots would always be important to her, for better or worse, Los Angeles was home. Knowing Frances was unhappy at Balboa and in her marriage, Mary Pickford offered her a job. Frances did not want to act, but if everyone was going to keep propelling her in front of the camera, she preferred to work with people she liked and respected. "When Mary said, 'We'll have fun together,' all my resistance fled and I signed on the dotted line." She would be paid to act, but Mary promised to let her work on the scenarios as well. Frances moved into a bungalow in the same courtyard where Mary and her mother were living. Charlotte Pickford viewed living on the West Coast as a temporary situation. Perusing the still developing neighborhoods of Los Angeles, she invested Mary's income in land but not houses and insisted they continue renting. The poverty of their earlier years influenced every decision Charlotte made and she made all the decisions. The rooms in the bungalows were small, the overhead lights were too bright, and the plaster on the walls looked like "an advanced stage of smallpox," but there were spacious vine-covered porches to enjoy on warm evenings. All in all, Frances considered the change a small price to pay for her freedom and at twenty-six with two marriages behind her, she was truly on her own for the first time in her adult life. It felt a bit precarious, but living near and working with Mary was a dream come true. 43

WITHOUT LYING DOWN Charlotte and Frances liked each other immediately. Whereas others saw Charlotte as an oppressive influence, Frances saw genuine love and caring and in turn, Mary's mother welcomed her daughter's having a real friend and confidante. And being with Mary every day deepened Frances's appreciation for her discipline and experience.21 Mary had been making movies since she presented herself as an experienced Broadway actress to D. W. Griffith at Biograph, a former mansion turned studio in lower Manhattan, in April of 1909. A frustrated stage actor who had turned to directing a little over a year before Mary arrived on the doorstep, Griffith had already made more than one hundred films. Mary knew movies were a comedown, but it was the offseason and money had to be made. The five dollars a day Biograph was paying would not be sufficient; "I must have ten," Mary announced with such surety that Griffith agreed to pay. She was immediately put to work in Her First Biscuits, a three-quarterreel comedy, and in less than a year, she appeared in almost fifty movies.22 Under Griffith's direction, and through working with his cameraman Billy Bitzer, Mary learned the technical side of moviemaking. During the filming of Friends, Bitzer physically moved the camera in toward the stage so that only Mary's face and upper body filled the lens; the term "close-up" was being added to the vocabulary and the distinction between the stage and film was being formalized. Cameras had been moved since early cinema, but Griffith "used it with such finesse and with such emotional power that it was easy to imagine he invented the close-up."23 Frances and Mary were at the Famous Players studio on Melrose by seven every morning and Frances devoted herself to writing and watching as she worked on the scenarios with Mary, her director James Kirkwood, and her costar Mickey Neilan. They quickly turned out Fanchon the Cricket, Little Pal, and Rags before Frances was cast as "the wicked sophisticate" Rosanna Danforth who has her eye on Mary's beau in A Girl of Yesterday.2* In her role as a vamp, Frances was called upon to woo a pilot and Glenn Martin, a local aviator, was hired. Flying a plane was an everyday occurrence for Martin, but once filming had started, he claimed "nobody told me I'd have to kiss girls." He refused to go through with that part of the plot "because my mother wouldn't like it," until the Famous Players studio head, Adolph Zukor himself, came on location to Griffith Park and insisted Martin give Frances at least a little peck.25 Frances took it all in good humor and had a great time, especially when the cameras weren't rolling. The huge yacht of the San Francisco multimillionare John D. Spreckles was featured in some particularly luxurious scenes and she enjoyed their director Allan Dwan, who had been working in films for over five years.26 44

CARI BEAUCHAMP Dwan sincerely liked people and was secure enough in his own abilities to include others in the process. The friendly atmosphere extended to his inviting everyone to his wedding to the actress Pauline Bush in San Juan Capistrano during a weekend break. Inspired by the church mission and in a burst of regret over the secret surroundings of their own wedding, Mary and Owen asked the priest to renew their vows in a Catholic ceremony. The service struck Frances as halfhearted at best. She knew how little time they spent together and had seen too much of Owen's behavior and Mary's unhappiness to put any faith in a ritual.27 After shooting was finished each day, Frances worked on her own scenario for Mary, entitled The Foundling. She opened the story by establishing that twelve-year-old Mary, the cheerful favorite of all the other children in the orphanage, has been abandoned after her mother died in childbirth and her artist father is unable to face raising the daughter alone. Mary is soon adopted by the proprietor of a boardinghouse, who brusquely informs her, "I didn't bring you here to mother you, I brought you here to work." Mary runs away and through a twist of fate, goes to work for her real father as a maid. After more complications, the truth is revealed and the father properly chastises himself: "My poor little girl with the toil worn hands. I'll make up for all my neglect if you will forgive me." The camera fades out on Mary's glowing face, smiling through her tears.28 There were similarities in The Foundling to several of the films Frances had worked on at Bosworth, such as Lois Weber's False Colors, where a child is forced into adoption under comparable circumstances. But if mistaken identities and rags-to-riches plots were overused, Mary knew that Frances's scenario gave her a breadth of opportunities to display her comedic and dramatic skills. She passed the script on to Adolph Zukor and when Frances was paid $125 for her script, "I ceased walking on this earth."29 The Foundling was to be shot in New York, where Famous Players and many of the larger companies were still based. Mary encouraged Frances to join them, but she pled poverty. She had already developed the habit, after paying the rent and sending money home to her mother, of spending the remainder on clothes, friends, and good times. Yet she regretted her decision when she saw Mary, Charlotte, and the crew off at the train station in late June, and promised to get to New York in time for the premiere. Mary kept her posted on the filming; Allan Dwan was again her director and Frank Mills, Harry Ham, Gertrude Norman, and Donald Crisp rounded out the cast. She assured Frances that the best way to determine how a film was going was to watch the crew, and on The Foundling set, everyone was relaxed and enjoying themselves.30 Frances continued to write short stories and several were published, 45

WITHOUT LYING DOWN including "The Fisher Girl," which Equitable bought for their leading lady, Clara Whipple. It was a nice windfall and when Balboa offered Frances a costarring role in a Monte Blue western, she stashed what she could of the $200 salary and used the rest to buy a train ticket for New York City. The five days it took to cross the country on the train gave Frances plenty of time for reflection, but she tried not to second-guess what was awaiting her. She arrived at the recently opened Grand Central Station and walked to her destination, a few blocks away. Mary had reserved a room for her at "the only place to stay," the Algonquin Hotel on West 44th Street.31 By the fall of 1915, the Algonquin was already known as a home for creative spirits. Frank Case had been running the hotel for over ten years, starting before the completion of what was originally designed as an apartment building. So few chambers were leased that they began renting on a weekly and then daily basis, creating a unique atmosphere. Renowned for his charm and friendliness, Case welcomed writers and actors above all others. He called his love of show people a "progressive disease" first inflicted upon him as a young boy when he had worked at different times as an usher in all three of Buffalo's theaters.32 As Frances signed the registration book, she was suddenly intimidated and told the clerk that the small bag she was carrying held only her overnight things. The trunks, she assured him, would follow. Yet she was bathed in a feeling of exhilaration and relief to be finally in New York. Instead of coming with Robert to study art, she had made it on her own and just two weeks before, The Foundling had received a rave review in Moving Picture World's section on upcoming films. The article fawned over Mary, "the world's foremost motion picture star," and while not mentioning Frances by name, the reviewer found that "the photoplay absorbingly unfolded, not however until a number of tense dramatic situations and a series of novel incidents have been developed."33 She called Mary at the studio and learned she would not be home for at least an hour. Brimming with energy and "full of dreams, plans and kindled ambitions," Frances decided to walk. Map in hand, she turned up Broadway and saw that even after six months of consecutive screenings, a line was beginning to form for the evening showing of The Birth of a Nation. Crowds were growing in front of another theater down the street where large posters portrayed Theda Bara with her hands on an older man in a tuxedo and top hat with the tag line "Kiss me, you fool." Frances shook her head in bewilderment; her love-hate relationship with the movies was already setting in. When she arrived at the Pickford apartment on Riverside Drive, Mary opened the door with tears in her eyes and hugged Frances tightly. 46

CARI BEAUCHAMP "Darling," Mary said, "I have terrible news for you; the negative of The Foundling was burned in a laboratory fire before any prints were made."34 A little before seven on the previous Saturday evening, a fire had broken out on the second floor of 213 West 26th Street. The flames quickly spread to the third and fourth floor, where the Famous Players studios, offices, and prop department were housed. The three lone late-working employees escaped through the windows without serious injury, but it wasn't until Monday that the fire department allowed Adolph Zukor and his laboratory manager Frank Meyer in to assess the damage and open the vaults where the negatives were stored. The entire property department of period furniture and costumes accumulated over the past three years was gone and ten of the eleven finished films being held for distribution were all or partially destroyed. It was a major setback for the company, but they were recovering quickly. Filming was shuttled to a studio in Yonkers, offices were opened within days at the Columbia Bank Building on Fifth Avenue, and Adolph Zukor hired double shifts of workers to build a new studio on 225th Street.35 For Frances, the loss was devastating. The Foundling negative was burned beyond repair and she had counted on a successful New York premiere to help her obtain a writing contract. Mary assured her The Foundling would be remade eventually, and feeling responsible for her being in New York, offered her a role in her next scheduled film, Madame Butterfly. There was no doubting Mary's sincerity, but Frances already felt in debt to Mary for taking a chance on her and was uncomfortable with any further favors. She knew it would be some time before The Foundling was reshot; Allan Dwan had left to work with another studio, so not only would time have to be found in Mary's schedule but a new director as well. Besides, Frances didn't want to act, she wanted to write. There was little or no public credit, but she actually found comfort in the anonymity and fulfillment from the accomplishment of telling a story well. She thanked Mary and promised to think about it, but vowed to herself she would not return to California. She was already captivated by the mix of theater, art, and films that New York radiated; even without a produced film to point to, she would figure out a way to stay.36 Mary may have been her only real friend in New York, but Frances had brought several letters of introduction for insurance. The most promising of her potential contacts were Mr. and Mrs. Harrison Fiske—the editor of the Dramatic Mirror and his actress wife, whom she had met in Arnold Genthe's studio. Minnie Maddern Fiske was an established star of theater and she would do anything for her favorite photographer, "Ginky." When Frances called, their niece Merle invited her to lunch. Mrs. Fiske 47

WITHOUT LYING DOWN was in Washington rehearsing a play, but Merle and Harrison Fiske were enthralled by Frances's stories of Hollywood and the movies. The Dramatic Mirror had been reviewing films since 1907 and Mrs. Fiske had reprised her Broadway role of Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair before the movie cameras for Kleine-Edison. The Fiskes viewed motion pictures as "an art form that has not yet found itself," but believed that "its possibilities reach beyond the boundaries of the imagination." Merle was the same age as Frances and they became friendly immediately.37 Both Merle and her uncle were confident they could help Frances find a job in New York, but they were about to leave to join Mrs. Fiske in Washington. Frances knew she needed something right away, but tried not to appear deflated. To hide her concern, she assured them she had an alternative plan and as she was about to divulge that she could pass as a professional cook, the doorbell rang. As other company was being ushered in, Frances left, telling Merle she looked forward to seeing her again soon. Frances tried her luck with the various New York film studios, but after a long week of knocking on production office doors and fruitless waits for calls that didn't come, she knew she had to conserve her resources. The Algonquin was two dollars a day and she had only thirty dollars left. She moved to a cheaper hotel downtown and on the way, ducked into the Hotel Astor and slipped some of their stationery into her bag.38 In a burst of courage born of desperation, Frances wrote individual letters on the Astor letterhead to the prominent New York producers Daniel Frohman, William Fox, and William Brady. Introducing herself as an experienced scenario writer who had worked with Lois Weber, she informed them that since The Foundling negative had been burned and The Fisher Girl was only now being filmed, she proposed to prove her worth by working for two weeks at no salary. Assuming "the results are satisfactory," she would be willing to accept a one-year contract at $200 a week. She closed by saying she would call in a few days to arrange a personal appointment.39 The highest-paid scenario writer in 1915 was C. Gardner Sullivan, providing plots for cowboy star William S. Hart at $75 a week, so she was frankly amazed when both Fox and Brady agreed to see her. Frances waited an hour in William Fox's anteroom with a variety of other aspirants, watching as his stern-faced secretary, whom Frances mentally nicknamed "The Judge," informed each of those leaving, "Don't call us, we'll call you." Finally it was her turn to be ushered in and Frances found a little man sitting behind a desk who seemed to methodically undress her with his eyes. Trying to ignore the implication, Frances poured out her meager qualifications, mixing them with substantive suggestions for scenarios and productions. But Fox's response was to tell her that such a pretty girl should be 48

CARI BEAUCHAMP wearing beautiful furs and jewelry, not thinking about a lowly writing job. "Well," he asked, smiling meaningfully, "what do you think?" In spite of a combination of nerves and irritation, Frances smiled back. "I'm paid to think, Mr. Fox; two hundred dollars a week. As a scenario writer." He laughed as if he would dismiss her completely, then offered her eighty dollars a week. Frances was simultaneously shocked and thrilled, but tempted though she was, it wasn't on her terms. Unable to bring herself to say no outright, she demurred with "Thank you very much, Mr. Fox, I'll consider your offer." But as she left the inner sanctum and heard The Judge's "Don't call us, we'll call you," Frances had second thoughts. Fox had referred to writers as "poor schlemiels" and he was right. She told herself that any fool, especially a hungry one, who turned down eighty dollars a week was nothing but a "poor schlemiel." She was sure William Brady would have the same reaction, and she had no one to blame but herself.40 What Frances didn't know was that William Brady proudly called himself "a born gambler." Originally from San Francisco, Brady gravitated toward the theater, where he met another aspiring actor, James Corbett, at an amateur show. Convincing Corbett that the quickest route to recognition was as a heavyweight boxer, Brady became his manager. Leasing the sedate Drury Lane Theatre for "Gentleman Jim" Corbett's London boxing debut, they traveled all over Europe and America and Brady became known as the "veritable apotheosis of the word promoter" with "enough brass for an entire marching band." He added other fighters to his management roster and took over the Metropolitan Opera House for a wrestling match. If it was on the stage, Brady loved it.41 William Brady was fifty-three years old and had already made and lost several fortunes when Frances's inquiry arrived. He had produced dozens of Broadway plays over the past twenty years and owned and operated several theaters in New York and Chicago. Introduced to moving pictures when he sold the rights to a boxing match in 1897, he quickly realized that producing was the only source of unlimited profits, so he had welcomed Lewis Selznick's proposal to form a partnership to film Brady's plays.42 The Kiev-born Selznick was a promoter at heart, but his experience had been limited to selling jewelry when he talked his way into Universal's New York offices in 1912. World was a distribution agency for independent films when he joined them as vice president and general manager in 1914 but by convincing theater producer Lee Shubert and then Brady to invest in the studio and put their plays on the screen, Selznick built World into a major player. The same week Frances wrote her letters, Brady, Selznick, Shubert, and the board of directors of World had celebrated the company's one-year 49

WITHOUT LYING DOWN anniversary. They were committed to releasing three feature films a week and announced expansion plans for their Fort Lee, New Jersey, studios that included a state-of-the-art laboratory for both black-and-white film and experimenting with "natural colors." World Films attracted a relatively experienced stable of actors including former Vitagraph darling Clara Kimball Young and established Broadway stars Robert Warwick, William Farnum, and Alice Brady. Lillian Russell had made her screen debut in World's production of Wildfire. Veteran French film directors Emile Chautard, Albert Capellani, and Maurice Tourneur, along with art director Ben Carre, all joined World when the American branches of their film companies foundered with the onslaught of the European war. With the imprimatur of so many Broadway hits on their list of releases, World had built-in publicity for their feature films at a time when other studios were flailing for material. What they needed most at that moment were writers skilled at adapting plays into screen scenarios and creating original stories.43 Frances knew little of the studio's situation when she set her sights on World, but she heard William Brady was a tough Irishman from San Francisco who did not suffer fools gladly; she steeled herself accordingly. When she arrived for her meeting at the World offices at 130 West 46th Street, she was told Brady was expecting her, but he was still at one of his theaters rehearsing a new play. The young man on duty gave her a card of introduction and after walking two blocks down Broadway, Frances was led through the dark to a man seated alone in the fifth row. He never gave her a glance as he directed a rehearsal of The Man Who Came Back, starring a tall, young newcomer named Conrad Nagel. For more than an hour, Frances watched what she thought was an exceptional if exhausting performance and when the actors were finally dismissed, the man to her right turned as if she had just arrived and asked, "Who in the devil are you?" She started to fumble her words after introducing herself and was saved by Brady's wide smile. He told her he had been amused and intrigued by her letter and he liked her style and faith in her ability. He had "a weakness for sponsoring other San Franciscans" and the fact she had worked at a variety of jobs as he had was also in her favor. "Show up at the studio tomorrow. I'll see if you are as clever as you think you are." Stunned, she thanked him as she rose from her seat, but paused as he said, "There's one more thing." He thought the name Frances Marion sounded like "a whorehouse madame." "I'll call you Pete."44

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ranees took the 7:30 ferry across the Hudson River to Fort Lee the next morning and arrived at World studio's front gate, where the solicitous guard assumed she was an actress. When she told him she was a writer, he unceremoniously pointed to a bench and said, "Wait for 'Sternie.' " After an hour, a slight young man in his late teens, walking with a confidence beyond his years, strode toward her with an outstretched hand and introduced himself as Joe Stern. He showed her to a row of small cubicles he called offices and told her to make herself at home. For the next two days, Frances concentrated on being as inconspicuous as possible while staring at a blank sheet of paper. Reality set in and with it came a surge of self-doubt and consternation over her audacity. Then her practical side took hold and as she pondered her past, she seized on one of the first lessons she learned from Lois Weber: "A good editor can make even a mediocre film seem important." Perhaps World had some movies that had been shelved as unreleasable that she could somehow doctor, and in desperation, she sought out Sternie.1 He listened sympathetically as she poured out her story of writing to Brady on a whim and their oral agreement for a two-week tryout. Sternie assured her that serendipity had played a role for almost everyone at the studio. He had begun his career repairing sprocket holes and lugging film cans, but when the head of the shipping department was caught taking kickbacks, Sternie was put in charge. He had risen to supervising editing and titles and while he was glad for the job, he was not a fan of the films being produced and was dubious of the possibility of Frances's salvaging any of the undistributed pictures. "They're tripe," he stated authoritatively, but agreed to send the films to the projection room.2 As the last of four films unspooled in the vaultlike room, Frances felt as if she were "interred in her final resting place." With no idea how to salvage them, she could only wonder why they were made in the first place as Sternie reappeared and pronounced the fifth and final film the worst of the lot. 51

WITHOUT LYING DOWN "How could it be any worse than the others?" Frances asked in despair. "Because they spent a lot of money on it. Nine thousand dollars. You should have heard the boss." Frances quickly realized another, unstated reason William Brady was furious about the film: it starred his daughter, Alice. Money he could lose, but Brady was not going to have his young progeny, an experienced stage actress just out of her teens, embarrassed.3 She laughed out loud as she watched the actors' melodramatic antics like "a macabre dance in a madhouse," but as the film unfolded, it occurred to her that if it were turned into a comedy, it might be saved. Dismissing a dream sequence as too predictable, she decided to try a prologue to set the story in an entirely new context. Frances opened with Alice announcing to her fiance that she cannot marry him because the novel she has just completed will bring her literary fame and fortune, and the original movie becomes the plot of her opus as she presents it to a group of publishers. Because of the introduction, the audience could laugh at the absurd situations and what had been gross overacting became a farce. She wrote a closing scene showing the inevitable: chastened by the experience, Alice happily dumps the manuscript into the wastebasket and welcomes her fiance into her waiting arms. William Brady read Frances's revisions skeptically, but he knew that the relatively minor cost of shooting new scenes was well worth the investment. She watched from the sidelines as the prologue and epilogue were shot in a matter of hours and within a week, the film sold for distribution at a $9,000 profit. The next day, Frances saw her name in print in the New York papers under the caption "Highest paid scenario writer in America signs with William A. Brady for reputed salary of $200 a week." She celebrated that night by ordering the most expensive steak on the menu, but Brady still called her "Pete."4 She called Mary to share the good news and, her income and position assured, Frances moved back to the Algonquin but, not wanting to tempt fate, asked for the smallest available room. As she was whisked into the vortex of activity at the studio, a series of fortunate coincidences changed her life considerably. She ran into a San Francisco friend who was returning to the West Coast but wanted to find work for her highly valued maid and seamstress, Margaret. If Frances took her for just two hours a day at twenty-five cents an hour, she was sure she could fill the rest of her time working for others. While Frances could now afford to buy fashionable clothes, she enjoyed designing and cutting her own patterns, and she needed someone to sew them so she agreed to the arrangement. 52

CARI BEAUCHAMP Margaret was a very elegant young black woman and when she saw the size of Frances's "postage stamp" room, she started to back right out the door. In a proper English accent, Margaret told her it was not half big enough for her, let alone a maid, but Frances assured her she would be at the studio when Margaret was there. Frances next acquired a car and driver when, on the street one day, she met a man she had known as a chauffeur in San Francisco. He was working as a garage mechanic at night and as they continued talking, he told her he knew of a great bargain on a used car and would be glad to drive her to and from the studio at very reasonable rates. Frances conceded that it was a good idea, primarily because the streetcar and ferry connections out to Fort Lee were unreliable and time-consuming and she realized how much more she could write if she never had to look up.5 She added a secretary to her retinue, who sat on the bed and used the nightstand as a desk to type the scenarios Frances was churning out at the rate of two or three a week in addition to the columns she was authoring as a ghostwriter for Mary Pickford. Samuel Sidney McClure, known to his friends as S.S., had successfully created the idea of syndication—paying big money to celebrities and selling their stories to a variety of newspapers for simultaneous publication when no single paper could pay such prices individually. Mary Pickford was the perfect choice for a McClure -syndicated author and her column appeared on the women's page of participating newspapers as "Daily Talks." Through Frances's pen, five days a week, Mary dispensed helpful beauty secrets, advice on friendships, and memories of her "happy girlhood." Mary was paid a thousand dollars a week and Frances made fifty, but she claimed to "love the experience." Her background in advertising helped her know what people wanted to hear and she knew Mary so well it was easy to find her voice. And it was a great excuse to get together at least once a week to review what had been written and discuss future ideas.6 After completing Madame Butterfly, Mary remade The Foundling with veteran director John B. O'Brien and a new cast. It was released to popular acclaim in January of 1916 and affirmed that her fans loved her playing a little girl.7 There was no writer's credit on the screen, uut that was normal and Frances knew it. Besides, within less than three months of her arrival in New York, she had firmly established herself. She realized the extent of the incredible changes when Merle Maddern called her at the Algonquin after returning from Washington and the phone was answered by the very proper Margaret. "Miss Mahrion's apahtment. Her personal maid is speaking." When 53

WITHOUT LYING DOWN Merle asked if Frances was there, Margaret replied, "I think she is out. If you will wait a moment, Til ahsk her private secretary." Believing in keeping up pretenses at all costs, Margaret waited the appropriate few seconds before saying, "Miss Mahrion's private secretary tells me that Miss Mahrion has just gone out in her motorcah." Merle jumped to the conclusion that Frances had turned to prostitution, as there could be no other explanation for her drastic change in economic status. She ran to her uncle's office with the news and Harrison Fiske promptly wrote out a check and sent her to save Frances from a life of sin. She arrived to find Frances back in her "Lilliputian room" and the two women laughed until they cried over Merle's misconceptions and the real story behind Margaret's slightly stretched descriptions.8 Frances worked six days a week and into most nights, but Marie Dressier was back on Broadway starring in Tillies Nightmare at the Keith theater, so they made a date for a late supper at the Algonquin. "Now start from the beginning and if I interrupt like I always do, just step on my foot to shut me up," Marie told Frances as she sank into a couch in the lobby. "I got a bunion that hurts if an ant walks on it." Marie was unique and Frances loved her for it, but before she could say much of anything, Marie started telling her about her latest Tillie film for the Lubin studios in Philadelphia and then began reliving the night's performance in the theater. In full voice, she broke into the final stanzas of the show's hit song, "Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl": Stand back there, villain, go your way, Here I will no longer stay; Although you were a Marquis or a Earl You may tempt the upper classes, With your villainous demi-tasses, But Heaven will protect the working girl9

Applause burst forth throughout the lobby of the Algonquin just as it had hours before in the theater. Since the hotel was a magnet for the biggest stars of the stage, her presence had drawn little attention initially, but now diners grabbed paper from the writing desk for Marie to sign autographs and she basked in the attention without a hint of embarrassment. As the crowd thinned, Marie stuck out her foot again. "Now concentrate on my bunion and don't let me interrupt again." Frances regaled her with the story of The Foundling, the fire, and landing the job at World. That very day she had "hit the jackpot again," selling her magazine story "Woman Against the Sea" to the Fox studios. 54

CARI BEAUCHAMP Tm going over tomorrow to sign on the dotted line." "Soak them for it," counseled Marie. "The more they pay for anything, the better they think it is." "I might lose the deal," responded Frances, still taking her success as more of a fluke than a certainty. "Sissybritches," said Marie, as only she could. "Have you forgotten already how you landed the World Films job? Pull the trigger the moment you step into the office. They're used to being fired on."10 The $5,000 Frances received for "Woman Against the Sea" was an enormous amount for the time and she took great pleasure in regarding it as retribution for William Fox's condescending remarks of several months before. But the growth in her net worth also served as her only consolation as she learned that her story, based on the true adventures of a strong young Norwegian woman who captains a ship and handles a mutinous crew, had become The Iron Man starring William Farnum. When she asked if they were somehow writing the woman out of the plot entirely, Frances was introduced to a tall, fine-boned, and very poised young woman in a tea gown who held out her hand with dignity and assurance. Elda Furry was the antithesis of the physically strong woman Frances had imagined and when her face registered her bewilderment, the star's response was ice cold. "I am an actress, Miss Marion," Elda said in a feigned aristocratic accent. "I have been schooled by one of the greatest actors on the American stage, my husband, De Wolf Hopper, and I am not afraid of any role." Frances had her money and her job at World and since The Iron Man or Woman Against the Sea or whatever they were going to call it was to be filmed on the California coast, she wouldn't even be subjected to hearing about it.11 Work was so all-encompassing that Frances paid little attention to the outside world, but she participated on October 23, 1915, when more than thirty thousand supporters of women's right to vote marched from Washington Square up to 16th Street. Two hundred fifty thousand cheering and jeering bystanders lined the streets as bands played "Tipperary" and men and women on horseback carried purple-and-gold banners. Society women like Mrs. Otis Skinner and grandes dames of the theater like Lillian Russell joined in support of the crusade that had been creating a growing national sensation without the desired result for almost seventy years. Even the movies were paying growing attention to the issue, but usually with plots that painted suffragettes as frustrated, zealous women whose families suffered because of their devotion to the cause. Still, newsreels helped spread the word of the ever-increasing support for women suffrage.12 Frances and friends like Adela Rogers had marched in parades before, yet 55

WITHOUT LYING DOWN they nursed a nagging suspicion that women were "trading superiority for equality." Women had been voting in California since 1911 and it seemed such an "obvious right," it was almost insulting to have to convince others.13 Elsie Janis was back in New York as well, starring in Miss Information on Broadway. It was her first straight comedy show without the impersonations she was famous for and it folded after ten weeks. She had never faced anything less than a huge success and she and her mother, still so inseparable that Frank Case took to calling them "the Jani," decided it was time for a change of scenery. Ma Janis found Phillipsburg Manor just outside Tarrytown in the Hudson Valley and the history of the house cemented the decision; George Washington had been in love with the original owner's daughter and the bridge outside the house was featured in Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Yet it was only an hour from Broadway and close enough for weekend parties.14 A few weeks after the suffrage march, Frances took Elsie up on her invitation to a Tarrytown party. The leaves had already fallen from the trees in November of 1915 and it was a particularly dismal day, but she bought a guidebook and familiarized herself with the local history and was enchanted with the small towns and the estates that dotted the roads. As Frances arrived at the main entrance of the sprawling manor, she was greeted with a rush of hands and smiles, mostly from people she had never met before, and in the next room voices were singing "Won't You Come Home, Bill Bailey." Elsie whisked her through the house for a quick tour: room after room with low ceilings that seemed like a labyrinth laced with a dozen fireplaces. When they returned to the drawing room, Ma Janis was presiding over the huge buffet table and Frances looked around at the eclectic gathering she knew would congregate only for Elsie. Irving Berlin, William K. Vanderbilt, Frank Case and his fiancee, Bertha Grayling, Vernon and Irene Castle mixed with token English royalty and chorus girls. Mary Pickford and Owen Moore were already in their separate corners when Frances arrived. With a glass in his hand, Owen looked particularly sullen and Mary went from attempts at polite conversation to sitting in a corner thumbing through a fashion magazine. Some of the guests were starting to depart when Douglas Fairbanks and his wife, Beth, arrived. The actor's first film, The Lamb, had just been released and was such a hit that D. W. Griffith signed him to a three-year contract. Frances knew them by sight from the Algonquin, where they had checked in only weeks before but felt very much at home because it had been their residence off and on during their eight-year marriage.15 Frances had also noticed their young son playing in the lobby, but neither of his parents was the type of person she was naturally drawn to; 56

CARI BEAUCHAMP Douglas literally jumped over the sofas in the foyer and she saw "no spark of life" in Beth, whose very existence seemed to revolve totally around her husband,16 Even by his own standards, Doug was particularly animated at Elsie's and with a hearty "Hello," he shook Frances's hand so hard she thought her arm might come out of its socket. With a deep bow, he presented himself to Mary and Owen and she complimented him on The Lamb, which she had just seen at the Knickerbocker. Doug may have been used to the spotlight, but he was not so egocentric that he failed to notice Owen's almost disdainful treatment of Mary, who was so clearly worshiped by everyone else in the room. Elsie had known the Fairbankses from years on the road, sharing a history of overlapping performances and parties. She found Beth sweet, but a bit foolish for spending all her time "proving that to her the world was Douglas Fairbanks and Douglas Fairbanks was the world." Frances thought that Elsie was acting as "awestruck as a little girl" in front of Doug, but even she had to admit Fairbanks was "the type of man who makes you look in the mirror." In fact, Elsie had been rather openly nursing what she called a longtime "pash" for Doug and seeking to get him off alone, she asked for volunteers to go for a walk.17 Mary Pickford remembered the incident somewhat differently. She thought Elsie had been overtly flirting with every man in the room all afternoon and when she came bounding up to the group and said "Come on, Doug, Come on, Owen, Let's the three of us go for a walk," Mary was appalled. Almost as an afterthought, Elsie turned to Mary and Beth and said, "You girls don't mind if I steal your husbands for a few minutes." Mary had already caught Owen in compromising situations with several women, including Elsie, and while she may not have wanted him herself, that didn't mean anyone else could have him. Mary turned to Beth and said, "Let's go for a walk too. We're not going to let her get away with that." Beth went with Mary down the back hillside, but the bouncing, athletic Elsie had already determined that the steep inclines over her eleven acres, combined with the slippery logs that were the only bridge over the rolling Pocantico River, would discourage all but Doug and Owen. Beth quickly decided it was too cold and wet and turned back, but Mary, who could not have been dressed less appropriately for a hike in a tight black velvet skirt, white satin blouse, and white kid boots, was not to be deterred. When Elsie pointed out that she would ruin her new boots, Mary shouted back, "What's a pair of shoes compared to losing a husband?"18 The stubborn streak that served her so well in negotiations came to the fore and Mary scrambled down the hill, but the threesome was so far ahead 57

WITHOUT LYING DOWN of her they were soon in the woods. As she was halfway across the logs that forged the river, she froze in panic. Suddenly Doug reappeared at her side and asked permission to carry her. "Please do," said Mary, taken aback by the pure chivalry of the gesture as she was literally swept up in his arms. It was something she had not seen in real life for some time. The four of them walked the rest of the way together and Elsie, resigned to the situation, noted, "The Russian boots were ruined but Mr. Fairbanks and Miss Pickford had become Douglas and Mary by the time we dragged our weary bodies home."19 That same November of 1915, Equitable finally released A Daughter of the Sea, based on the story "The Fisher Girl" that Frances had sold before coming to New York. Her name was mentioned in the press as the original author and it received mixed reviews. One critic said the plot lacked depth and "fails to stir," but she was so involved at World that words that would have crushed her only months earlier didn't faze her now. She had quickly risen in prominence at the studio and they depended on her to write most of the films for Clara Kimball Young and Alice Brady, the two stars around whom World "block booked" all their movies to exhibitors. Frances tried not to be intimidated by adapting classics like Alexandre Dumas's La Dame aux Cornelias into Camille for Clara Kimball Young and joked about avoiding cliche titles like "Camille is coughing much better this morning." Frances stayed close to the original story for Camille and laughed that Clara looked healthy enough to "enter the Olympics" though she was supposed to be dying of tuberculosis on the screen. Paul Capellani, who had played Armand in Sarah Bernhardt's Camille on the Paris stage, repeated his role, and if there was any implication drawn that Clara was the same caliber actress as Bernhardt, so much the better. Clara was under personal contract to Lewis Selznick and he carefully orchestrated her publicity, reporting she had "braved the wards of hospitals" to conduct a detailed study of tuberculosis.20 In spite of Selznick's heavy prose and his promotion of her as the aloof "Mona Lisa type," Frances knew Clara rarely spoke in words of more than two syllables or spent even a day studying for a role. Fun-loving to a fault, Clara called Selznick "Old Smellstick" and resisted his attempts to keep her under wraps, wondering out loud what was the use of having all this money if she couldn't live life as she pleased. She told Frances that Camille was a dull role: "All I've got to do is cough, kiss a guy named Armand who's supposed to be French, cough, kiss the same guy again, then kick the bucket."21 58

CARI BEAUCHAMP Clara was a child of a theatrical family; her grandfather was the great English actor John Kemble and her parents had married on a New York stage after a performance. Clara was playing along with them by the age of three and when she signed with Vitagraph in 1911, she had performed in over half the states in the union. By her own estimation she had appeared in over one hundred films when she starred in My Official Wife, and it was such a box office smash that a bidding war for her services resulted; Lewis J. Selznick and World were the winners.22 Like Mary Pickford, Clara's star had ascended while those around her remained static, but lacking Mary's work ethic and her passion to succeed, Clara was happy to sit back and just enjoy the benefits of her fame. Her parents came with her to World, as did her husband of two years, James Young, a fairly successful Broadway actor, and Frances found the similarity between their relationship and Mary's and Owen's disheartening.23 The original stories and adaptations Frances wrote for Clara were usually designed around her dark-haired beauty: a Russian Jewish singer in The Yellow Passport and a Cuban aristocrat in The Feast of Life. She shared Clara's boredom with the heavy melodramas, but with a week to turn out a two-reeler and only slightly more to write longer films, the stories tended to blur together. Still, she was disappointed when Selznick would not allow Clara to branch out even after another dark-haired beauty with languid eyes, the accomplished Russian stage actress Alia Nazimova, was added to the stable. Selznick prided himself on his ability to sell and claimed, "I pick actors for their looks," but that philosophy was close to blasphemy to William Brady. He believed actors should be trained in speaking their lines, even if they weren't actually heard, and told Selznick he was wrong to typecast Clara in heavy costume dramas because he was convinced that a long and prosperous career could be built only on playing a variety of roles. Yet those costume melodramas guaranteed money at the box office and Selznick saw no reason to alter the recipe for success. Frances enjoyed writing scenarios like Then I'll Come Back to You and Tangled Fates for World's other major star, Alice Brady, because "she could play anything, tears or laughter, modern or period; there were few actresses comparable to Alice."24 Alice had been only three years old when her mother, the French dancer Rose Marie Rene, died. William Brady married the actress Grace George shortly thereafter and young Alice was sent to be educated at the Convent of St. Elizabeth in Madison, New Jersey, before entering the Boston Conservatory of Music, where she studied grand opera. Brady adamantly opposed his daughter's desire to become an actress, but she was deter59

WITHOUT LYING DOWN mined. Using a variation of her mother's name, Alice secretly joined a New England stock company as Mary Rose and traveled with De Wolf Hopper's Gilbert and Sullivan troop. After a year on the road, Alice confronted her father with her success and asked to come to New York under her real name. He reluctantly agreed and since starring in The Balkan Princess on Broadway in 1911 as Alice Brady, she had continued to work with him in his theaters and in film, equal to any role.25 Frances wanted to write original stories for new actors like Milton Sills and Doris Kenyon, but World tended to operate as a stock company and she was already feeling the pressure of a new trend that would never let up: copying the successes of other studios. The Squaw Man spawned a cluster of westerns and The Birth of a Nation brought about a glut of Civil War films. Titles were also imitated—when Mary Pickford's Tess of the Storm Country did well, World announced a film entitled Jess of the Storm Country. Frances reached for different eras, countries, and backdrops and wrote about the Balkans in The Gilded Cage, a Wyoming ranch in All Man, the European war in On Dangerous Ground, and Wall Street in Friday the Thirteenth. Poor motherless girls, rich young men, objecting families, lovers breaking up because of what others think or some loftier purpose, reuniting in the end, often with one of the romantic leads dying, were the grist for most of the plots. Occasionally there were hints of social relevance, such as preaching tolerance of illegitimacy in The Hidden Scar and exposing the price of marrying only for money in Bought and Paid For, but as a rule, the stories were the boilerplate—five-reel melodramas of love lost and found again that World spewed out at the rate of at least two a month.26 At that level of production, World became Frances's workshop to study how far characters could be pushed, what eccentricities could be developed and how actions, pantomimes, or even glances could tell a story by themselves. She tried to add quirks to her characters that would give them complexities and a depth that would distinguish them. She also was learning the fine art of studio politics, working well with most of the cast and crew and avoiding confrontations with her bosses whenever possible. Lewis Selznick's title was vice president and general manager of World, but he was often on the road, promoting the studio and encouraging the sales force. William Brady stayed active on Broadway, but the fact that he and Selznick were seldom on the same lot at the same time did not prevent outbursts when they were together. Frances was usually amused when fights erupted between the ex-jewelry salesman and the Broadway producer, but not when she was caught in the middle. William Brady handed her Henri Murger's Scenes de la vie de Boheme to adapt, cautioning her to stay clear of Puccini's opera to protect him from 60

CARI BEAUCHAMP potential lawsuits and, as usual, to "cook up some of your own stuff." With Albert Capellani directing Frances's script, two assistant directors, and Ben Carre as the art director, Brady carefully supervised every foot of film and liberally reshot scenes when they did not meet his high standards. Selznick was convinced the film was destined to lose money at the box office and saw all that talent on one project as a drain on the studio's resources. He insisted on a title change, and Mimi, The Bohemians, Bohemians Must Pay, The Undying Heart, and The Price ofPkasure were all suggested. "Calling it 'La Vie de Boheme alone will keep them out of the theaters," railed Selznick. "And titles are what we depend on to get them in."27 Frances decided that "no one can spew his contempt with better aim than an irate Irishman" and Selznick bore the brunt of it. And when La Vie de Boheme, released under its original title, was a financial success, Brady once again let Selznick know what he thought of his judgments in graphic terms. David Selznick would later say that, for a time, he thought his father "cared greatly" about the movies he was producing, but Lewis Selznick was first and foremost a salesman and "he was too concerned with empire building" to have time for the art form itself. With his love of the stage, the money was an affirmation of success to Brady, but theater was the motivation. Two very different outlooks, backgrounds, and experiences, exemplifying the variety of people the business was attracting. For the time being at least, there was room for both of them in the industry, if not at the same studio.28 Selznick left World and formed Lewis J. Selznick Productions, Inc., taking Clara Kimball Young, with whom he was rumored to be having an affair, with him. Frances was sorry to see them go, in part because she enjoyed the presence at the studio of his two young sons—David, then in his mid-teens, and his older brother, Myron. They were personable and well mannered and seemed to soak in the politics of studio life, as well as the technical skills.29 William Brady assumed active control of all of the studio's producing units and after working at World for only six months, Frances, now twenty-seven, was promoted to head the scenario department. In the middle of March 1916 she had six separate scenarios at various stages of completion. Brady gave her a three-week vacation for a trip to the Caribbean and that too turned into work. The Feast of Life was filmed on location in Cuba and she wrote several new stories during the journey for World's latest star, Gail Kane.30 Frances continued to write the "Mary Pickford's Daily Talks" and occasionally found time to go to parties with Alice Brady and other friends. She fed her love of music by visiting the apartment of pianist and composer Felix Arndt and his opera singer wife, Nola, who introduced her to new friends like Adolphe Menjou and Lillian Russell. Frances was reunited with 61

WITHOUT LYING DOWN Enrico Caruso, whom she had first met through her mother in San Francisco, and she also became friends with a woman who would influence her and promote her in the years ahead, Mary Roberts Rinehart.31 To all outward appearances, Mary Roberts Rinehart was a classic Victorian woman, a doctor's wife and the mother of three sons. But she was also a spectacularly successful and prolific author of more than one hundred magazine articles, a dozen books, and several plays, and had just returned from covering the European war for the Saturday Evening Post. Living in Pennsylvania, Rinehart had spent a fair amount of time in New York since becoming friends with the theater agent Beatrice de Mille, the widow of the playwright Henry C. de Mille and the mother of Cecil and William. Beatrice connected Mary with producers to back her plays and sold several of her magazine stories to the studios. The novel that had brought Mary to fame, The Circular Staircase, was being made into a film by Selig Polyscope and the amount of money the movie companies were willing to pay astounded her. Still, she had no interest in moving her family to California or working full-time for a studio.32 Frances was drawn to the older woman, who covered political conventions, marched in suffrage parades, and wrote while caring for her husband, sons, and invalid mother. Only gradually did she come to know the pressures Rinehart put on herself living as she did, rising before dawn and working late into the night in what she would call "that frantic search . . . for silence and freedom, not only from interruption, but from the fear of interruption." In Mary Roberts Rinehart, Frances found a new friend and mentor, a complex woman of substance who lived life on many levels.33

62

Ghapter 5

F

ranees had been working nonstop for almost a year. As head of the scenario department, she reviewed all World's scripts as well as writing her own. She helped cast the films, supervised screen tests for new talent, and often directed scenes. At night she watched films, both hers and those from other studios, and still she churned out five "Daily Talks" columns a week for Mary Pickford. Actors and directors started and then wrapped films, but Frances's work had no natural breaks. She still could not believe her good fortune and compulsively pushed herself, but even she could not keep up the pace. She was approaching her twenty-eighth birthday and had been supporting herself, with or without husbands, for over a decade. She still made heads turn, but the strain was showing on her face and she was losing weight. Under the best of circumstances it was an impossible schedule, and tragic news from home sent her over the edge. In the early evening of Friday, September 1,1916, Frances's sister Maude sent her seven-year-old daughter, Caroline, to play at the Moales* house next door on Miles Street in Oakland. Maude called her husband at his office in San Francisco and suggested he have dinner in town because she had nothing prepared. She then bolted the front door, went to the back bedroom, put a .22-caliber revolver to her head, and shot herself. Caroline came home at seven and found the door locked; when her mother didn't answer her calls, she returned to the neighbors'. Foster Moale came back with Caroline, broke down the door, and found Maude lying on the bed with a bullet hole in her head and a small gun on the floor. They rushed her to nearby Fabiola Hospital, where she died at 9:30 that night without ever regaining consciousness.1 No one could provide an explanation for Maude's suicide. Just thirty, she had been married to Wilson Bishop for more than ten years and he was doing well heading the San Francisco office of the Royal Insurance company; the San Francisco Chronicle went so far as to label him "a rich broker."

63

WITHOUT LYING DOWN He claimed their marriage was a happy one and told the family he knew of no cause for Maude's depression. The combination of physical exhaustion and the devastating loss of her older sister drained Frances of what strength she had left; she collapsed and was hospitalized. She had not been home for over two years and she was riddled with guilt, thinking senselessly that if only she had written more often, stayed in closer touch, taken the time to visit, somehow her sister would be alive. Maude's funeral was private and held three days after her suicide and even if Frances had been physically able to travel, the five-day train trip made it impossible to be there.2 Frances was more exhausted and malnourished than anyone knew, and after a week in the hospital, Marie Dressier took her to her Vermont farmhouse to convalesce. Marie cooked for her, sang, danced, and generally cajoled her back into living. Yet as she slowly recovered, Frances found the quiet peace of the farm a bit unnerving and she began to worry about Marie. The improvements she had made to the farm, including all modern appliances, two guest houses, and a swimming pool, had to have cost a fortune. Animals were everywhere because Marie thought they were "cozy," but she refused to kill or sell any of them. Frances was concerned Marie had created a "city dweller's idea of a dream farm" and she was most distressed when she finally met Marie's love, Jim Dalton, a New Englander whose wife would not divorce him. He was younger than Marie and looked like a prosperous banker or businessman, but his "courtly manners" made Frances uneasy and she concluded they were carefully cultivated rather than "from the heart out." When Marie said "How lucky I am to have him for my manager," Frances found herself shivering at the thought. Marie was convinced "time will prove that I'm absolutely on the right track" about both Jim and the farm, but she admitted that every cent was tied up and she would welcome a movie offer.3 After a month of rest, Frances was back at World. Because of publishing deadlines, several weeks of Mary Pickford's "Daily Talks" had been prepared in advance, but they would be the last. There was no one else Mary trusted to duplicate her thoughts and maintain her image and the syndicated column ended with Frances's collapse. With Brady's support, she tried working at a slightly slower pace, completing and supervising scenarios at the rate of one every three weeks instead of two or three a month. And one of the first was Tillie Wakes Up for Marie, Frances's script featured her as the belittled wife Tillie Tinkelpaw, not be confused with Tillie Banks of Tillies Punctured Romance or Tillie Blobbs of Tillies Nightmare, but if the paying audience made that mistake, so much the better.4 64

CARI BEAUCHAMP Frances was too occupied writing and editing scripts to be the on-set supervisor for Tillie Wakes Up, but she and Marie saw each other frequently and enjoyed New York's nightlife together. When Enrico Caruso appeared at the Metropolitan in Carmen, he invited the women backstage before the performance and then insisted they stay, dressing them in costume and putting them both in the chorus. Caruso "sneaked up behind Marie and gave her a pinch on her bottom while he was singing an aria," and Frances laughed over "the squawk she made, wanting to be heard."5 Frances had been storing up ideas for an original story about the film business and used them in an innovative scenario called A Girl s Folly, a behind-the-scenes look at moviemaking and a droll study of the powerful lure and inherent shallowness of stardom. Deference to the film industry is nonexistent—a black valet methodically signs the star's signature to a large pile of photographs and the actors have no idea of the story they are in the middle of making. The film was cowritten and directed by the French-born Maurice Tourneur and their individual contributions are discernible from the opening scene. A young girl from the country is sitting on a bench clutching a book, dreaming of worlds beyond her reach. In her imagination, a handsome troubadour appears and as she makes room for him on her bench, she is brought back to the real world with the arrival of the love-besotted local farmboy, Johnnie Applebloom. The beautifully lit fantasy sequence exemplifies Tourneur's work with cameraman John van den Broek and the art director Ben Carre, while the ability to establish immediately her character's dreams and situation in a single opening scene was becoming one of Frances's hallmarks.6 Her skill at revealing thoughts and reactions through pantomime is again illustrated when the handsome matinee idol offers the initially innocent Doris Kenyon another means to the pretty clothes and high life she craves after her screen test is a failure. She shakes her head no and leaves, only to see his long, sleek limousine. As she all but caresses the car longingly, she glances up to see a bent, laboring charwoman, her obvious alternative career choice—cut immediately to Doris in a beautiful gown being fussed over by a,maid. No titles are necessary to explain that she has become his mistress. To save the rather daring plot from the censor's wrath, the heroine returns home to the waiting arms of Johnnie Applebloom, but the unique movie-within-a-movie structure, the fantasy sequences, and the sardonic humor that infuses the entire film make A Girl's Folly much more than a melodramatic lesson.7 Tourneur left World for a better offer at Paramount a short time later 65

WITHOUT LYING DOWN and after making three films with Olga Petrova, he was assigned to direct Mary Pickford in The Pride of the Clan, a Scottish drama shot in Massachusetts. Mary was still smarting from her previous film, Less than the Dust, directed by John Emerson. Not only had it met with critical pans but the studio was flooded with letters; her fans wanted Mary as a little girl and not a grown woman.8 More than her image was at stake. Mary and her mother knew that they had so far been successful in riding the crest of the wave that was to become known as "the star system." Mary had been in the forefront of that revolution since 1912 when she became a well-paid pawn in the battle to break "the Trust," the name commonly applied to the Motion Picture Patents Company controlled by Thomas Edison and the ten film companies holding patents on their movie cameras. In theory, all producers had to pay a license fee for the cameras and any exhibitors showing films made by nonTrust companies were threatened with having their supply cut off. But the demand for product had skyrocketed as theaters quadrupled in number and piracy thrived. Small companies proliferated and headed to California and Florida, in part for the sun, in part to steer clear of the vigilantes the Trust hired to maintain their lucrative control. Carl Laemmle was a theater owner suffering from the shortage of films when he formed his Independent Motion Picture Company in open defiance of the Trust. He methodically chose a star a Trust company had created and offered "Little Mary—the girl with the curls" $175 a week. A doubling of her salary was too tempting for Mary and Charlotte to resist and they said a tearful good-bye to Griffith, but not before introducing him to her two childhood friends Lillian and Dorothy Gish. Soon Mary was lured away from Laemmle, first by Belasco to return to the stage in The Good Little Devil and then in the fall of 1913 by Adolph Zukor to re-create her stage role on the screen for his Famous Players company. With each move, her salary and fame increased.9 The studio bosses knew that once the actors' names were public knowledge costs went up, but in the rushed struggle to lure exhibitors away from the Trust's films and then to compete with each other, the independent producers willingly paid the ever-increasing salaries, and the star system was born. And no star ranked higher than Mary Pickford. Sarah Bernhardt was reportedly paid $30,000 to appear on the screen, but one reason for such vast sums to "the Divine Sarah" and, to a lesser degree, Lillian Russell and Lillie Langtry, was to legitimize the movies for other stage actors. And those were one-time, one-film arrangements, in contrast to Mary's annual salary, which broke records with each new contract.10 With Charlotte at her side, Mary renegotiated her agreement with 66

CARI BEAUCHAMP Adolph Zukor in July of 1916 to include a $40,000 signing bonus, $10,000 a week, and a percentage of the profits. Zukor told her, "Mary, sweetheart, I don't have to diet. Every time I talk over a new contract with you and your mother I lose ten pounds."11 Mary found comfort in imbuing her relationship with Zukor with a fatherdaughter aura. When he merged his Famous Players company with Jesse Lasky and his brother-in-law Sam Goldfish, she resisted dealing with anyone but "Papa" Zukor. Goldfish in particular became her "bete noire" and she quickly informed "Papa" when Goldfish made disparaging remarks about him.12 Cecil B. DeMille had been Lasky's leading director since the success of The Squaw Man in 1913 and with the merger he decided to take "an opportunity to help" Mary by directing her. Though Mary did not object to working with him, she announced she wanted Frances Marion to write the scenario. "I put my foot down firmly," DeMille said. He "respected" Frances, but adamantly refused to "divide responsibility with anyone else." He too had an image to maintain and DeMille never had and never would allow "script approval or any other such major authority to anyone who works in any of my pictures."13 In spite of her enormous salary, Mary did not have the right to choose her own director, but she could be as unswerving as DeMille. She stood her ground and insisted on hiring Frances. Zukor listened to his star's arguments: The Poor Little Rich Girl, chosen as Mary's next film, cast her as a youngster similar to the one Frances had created in The Foundling. In addition, Frances had had a solid year of writing experience since then. Zukor knew that if the film was successful, everyone would make money and if not, he would have Mary where he wanted her—with tangible proof that he was the better judge of her career—and he gave in to Mary's demand. Frances's mother arrived in New York for an extended visit, assuaging her guilt over paying so little attention to her family, and being with Mary and Charlotte again added to Frances's contentment. When Maurice Tourneur was named the director, Mary and Frances looked forward to getting to work.14 The Poor Little Rich Girl was to be filmed in Fort Lee, so William Brady loaned Frances for the picture, knowing she would be close at hand. Tourneur and Frances had shared a good professional relationship at World, but now Frances was the sole writer as well as the star's best friend; with the change in dynamics, differences in style and dispositions quickly emerged. As Mary was putting on her makeup early one morning, she noticed that when one of her mirrors caught the morning sunlight, its reflection on her face made her look much younger. When she told Tourneur about her accidental discovery, she assumed he would be as thrilled as she was, but he was not interested in experimenting. Mary suggested a compromise. 67

WITHOUT LYING DOWN "Take my close-up as you usually do, then would you get me a little spot, and put it on a soapbox or something, and direct it at my face? Then you can see it in the darkroom and choose." He couldn't refuse her reasonable approach delivered with that backbone of iron, and Mary turned out to be right. The "baby spot" was used in The Poor Little Rich Girl and every film that followed.15 "Tourneur shouted at you, he'd blow up and scare everybody off the set, but that was his temperament," remembered his assistant director Clarence Brown. "He wasn't malicious, but he did use sarcasm." Tourneur was unused to having his authority questioned, but the indignities he was to suffer were only beginning. Frances's adaptation was based on a rather serious melodrama of wealthy parents who give their only child everything but love, yet through what Brown called "the Pickford-Marion spontaneous combustion," comedy scenes were added literally as the cameras were rolling.16 As the two women added bits of slapstick, Tourneur threw up his hands in resignation, but when Mary extended an impromptu mud fight to include Frances and some of the crew, it was too much for the sophisticated French director: "But my dear young ladies, it has nothing to do with the picture. It is not in the play and I do not find it in the script. Mais non; c'est une horreur."17 The horror came for Frances and Mary after The Poor Little Rich Girl was privately screened for Zukor, Lasky, and bosses at Paramount. Not a single laugh came from the all-male group of executives. The women were solemnly informed that the film was "putrid" and the company "would rather face the loss and not release it rather than jeopardize Mary's career."18 Frances rushed back to the cutting room "groping blindly to sharpen the comedy," but the pronouncement that they had created a disaster remained unchanged. She was devastated, convinced she had personally ruined Mary, and Minnie had never seen her daughter so distraught. Frances returned to World as head of the scenario department with her faith in her own abilities severely shaken.19 Mary was called before "Papa" Zukor and made to write a letter of apology to Cecil B. DeMille, meekly agreeing to work with him. It was not only DeMille's growing reputation for total authority that depressed her; she had played her hand with Zukor and lost. She was still the highest-paid actress in the world, but her marriage was a sham and she had lost control of her career. The "marathon of work" that had been so rewarding suddenly looked like a prison. Mary, who had always clung tenaciously to her belief in herself, now signed the letter to DeMille, "Obediently yours, Mary Pickford." Alone in the hotel room she was again sharing with Owen that January 68

CARI BEAUCHAMP of 1917, Mary felt "a deadening weight on my spirit" and thought "that snow covered pavement looked very enticing" from the ninth-story window. Something stopped her and she called her mother. As soon as Charlotte heard "Mama, I need you," in a tone she had never heard before, she made Mary promise to do nothing and rushed out the door. Charlotte immediately sent for the doctor, who declared, "Unless you get this young lady out of here and away from her husband, the least you can expect is a complete nervous breakdown—the very least." Charlotte consulted Zukor, who agreed, but used Mary's momentary collapse as a perfect opportunity to send her to California to start her film with DeMille. Within two weeks Mary was on the train, but not before Douglas Fairbanks had thrown her a farewell party at the Algonquin.20 In spite of having her entire family with her in California—Charlotte, Jack, Lottie, and Lottie's baby, Gwynne, by her brief marriage to a car dealer named Alfred Rupp—Mary was petrified of DeMille and did not have a happy moment filming Romance of the Redwoods. As soon as it was completed, Mary used her two weeks off to come to New York, finding the ten days on the train a small price to pay for four days of fun and freedom with Frances. During her visit, with little of the usual advance publicity, The Poor Little Rich Girl opened at the Strand on Broadway. Zukor was forced to release the film because it had been presold to theaters and there was no other Pickford film to replace it. Frances had no desire to relive her humiliation by watching it on the big screen, but Mary insisted on dressing incognito and seeing the film with an audience. From the opening scene on, their comedy blended with Tourneur's unique dream sequences to inspire the packed house to laugh in all the right places. From the back balcony, it slowly occurred to Frances that the segments she had seen over and over in the editing room were being greeted as fresh and clever. Mary started to laugh and cry, hugging Frances with delight, but in her sobs of relief, Mary was soon recognized and their joy turned to terror as they fought a mob of fans to escape the theater. Police were called in and when they finally reached a taxi, Mary's hat and coat had been ripped to shreds. Frances genuinely feared for their lives, but there was no denying the exhilaration of Mary's fame and success. Rushing to share the news with their mothers, Frances and Mary realized they had allowed their confidence in their work to be eroded by the studio bosses and vowed to each other that they would never again trust the reaction to any film, particularly a comedy, screened in private without a real audience.21 Mary and Frances were more than vindicated as The Poor Little Rich Girl met unprecedented financial and critical success. In May 1917, Famous Players Lasky announced that Frances Marion was being signed at $50,000 a year 69

WITHOUT LYING DOWN "to prepare special features for Mary Pickford," starting with Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Her contract specifically stated, "Throughout the production, Miss Marion will continue by the side of the star and the director."22 The entire press release was printed verbatim in Moving Picture World and it was better than any formal apology. After a year and a half of honing her skills at World and credited with writing fifty films, Frances happily returned to Los Angeles, where she was played up in the press and the movie magazines as a gorgeous blue-eyed beauty with brains and a growing bank account. She was twenty-eight, but the trades called her either "very young" or in her "early twenties," and Photoplay announced that the Hollywood "highbrow colony has been augmented by the arrival from New York of Miss Frances Marion."23 Even though she had been gone for less than two years, Frances found the transformation in the landscape and the industry immense. There was still the aroma of orange blossoms, but new tall buildings actually created a downtown skyline and while events or parades were still occasionally used as backdrops, the growing popularity of films had made onlookers a problem for the moviemakers. Studios were being fenced in and location shooting had become a planned outing. Carl Laemmle turned the fans' curiosity to his advantage at his new 230-acre Universal City in the valley—for twenty-five cents each, five hundred people a day toured the studio and were given a box lunch while they sat on bleachers watching movies being made. Films were becoming so socially acceptable that the internationally acclaimed poet Vachel Lindsay wrote a book of praise entitled The Art of the Motion Picture comparing movies to great paintings and sculpture.24 Hollywood, incorporated fifteen years before with a population of 166 by a prohibitionist from Kansas, now boasted almost 30,000 residents. Still unconvinced about which neighborhoods would increase in value, Charlotte counseled Mary and Frances to rent and they leased houses two blocks from each other on Western Avenue between Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards, 1519 and 1748 respectively. Both houses were two stories high with expansive yards and Frances chose a white clapboard with a visible brick foundation and a porch that reached all across the front entrance and around the sides. She added accoutrements like rocking chairs under the palm trees for relaxing and always kept a lap board handy so she could write anywhere inspiration seized her. Minnie helped her move in and stayed for another month before returning home to San Francisco.25 The address of Frances's studio was the same—201 North Occidental— but almost everything else had changed. The name over the old Bosworth gate now read "Famous Players-Lasky-Morosco Studio" and it had increased in size and scope. A new large bungalow was being built just for 70

CART BEAUCHAMP Mary with a kitchen, a dining room, a bathroom, a dressing room with walls of mirrors and lights, and a huge closet. It was designed in an Oriental style, complete with a Japanese garden. "How pretty," beamed Mary, charmed by the little house as if it were a complete surprise and not a contractual obligation. "It's the first time I have ever felt like a star."26 With her new contract that put half of each film's profits into her own pocket, Mary wanted to be surrounded by those she considered peers and equals. Her best friend was her scenario writer and now she told Zukor she wanted their old pal Mickey Neilan signed to a two-year contract as her director. Mickey had been working around movies since Griffith had spotted the good-looking Irish charmer working as a chauffeur in 1910 and put him in front of the cameras. He spent two years bouncing between film companies with Allan Dwan, traveling throughout California and Mexico making a picture a week and two a week when they wanted time off, sharpening his skills while maintaining his cavalier outlook toward work. He had been directing for Selig and then Famous Players-Lasky for the past year and had just completed several films starring Jack Pickford. Mary's brother's contract with the studio may have been because of her, but his lightweight comedies held their own in box office returns. Mickey and Jack shared a tremendous capacity for alcohol and the attitude toward life that accomplishment was one thing, responsibility another. Mickey's first order of business after signing Zukor's contract at a huge increase in salary was to take a monthlong vacation in New York.27 Before the new team could start filming, Mary had to finish DeMille's The Little American. With Mickey in the East, Frances went to work with another Famous Players-Lasky star, her old friend Sessue Hayakawa. Sessue had worked steadily since their days at Ivy's, but after playing a rich Japanese playboy in DeMille's The Cheat, he could carry his own film.28 Frances wrote The City of Dim Faces with Sessue as the son of a Chinese merchant who falls in love with a white woman while at college and brings his fiancee home, with tragic results. She set her original story in San Francisco's Chinatown in order to film it on location, for she had not been home for over three years. No one would have known there had been an earthquake and fire only a decade before. Downtown glistened with tall buildings and flower stands stood on every corner. Chinatown had been completely rebuilt, but the location shooting was encumbered by armed guards assigned to stay with the crew because of a still smoldering tong war. Only days before they arrived, snipers had attacked in broad daylight and several dead Chinese had been pulled from the bay. 71

WITHOUT LYING DOWN Frances was slightly offended when none of her old friends inquired about Hollywood or moviemaking, and when one woman who had never been south spoke with disdain about Los Angeles, Frances was surprised to find herself defending her adopted home. She was troubled by the small world outlook of a city she had once considered so sophisticated and consoled herself that had her old Bohemian friends not scattered all over the globe, they would have been interested in her work and this new art form. San Francisco was still beautiful; she would always love it and consider herself fortunate, at times almost superior, for having been bom and raised there. But it was never quite the same place for her after The City of Dim Faces.29 As Mickey, Mary, and Frances reunited in Los Angeles in July of 1917, American troops were just landing on the battlefields of Europe. The United States had declared war on Germany in April and Mary's The Little American had a war background. Both of her DeMille films featured her as a mature woman and while they had resulted in some profits, her fans clamored to have her play a young girl once more.30 Rebecca ofSunnybrook Farm cast her as that child again and Frances saw the effect that the lack of a real childhood had had on Mary. She reveled in clowning in the circus scenes, not reliving past adventures but experiencing them for the first time. Frances put vignettes from her own childhood into the script, such as when at her father's resort she and her friends created a zoo and needed a zebra—the one available horse was too mean so they painted the cow black and white instead. When she shared these tales with Mary, her initial laughter turned to tears as she sobbed that she had been "the most miserable kid in the world," for all the shows she had been putting on as far back as she could remember had been on the stage.31 In becoming Mary Pickford, she had accepted the role of provider and all the responsibilities that went with it. When asked about their childhood, her sister, Lottie, simply responded, "We had none." But then with the touch of resentment that would always tinge their relationship she added, "Mary has always been Tittle Mother' to the whole family. She was constantly looking after our needs. I always used to think that she imagined Jack and I were just her big dolls."32 Mary and Frances were inordinately disciplined, arriving at the studio early every morning and staying until long after dark. They reviewed the work of the night before, went over that day's script, and checked the costumes and the sets. It was the hardest work they had ever done, but the freedom they felt was exhilarating. There was no one they had to cajole to get their way and Mickey Neilan became more like a partner in crime than any director either of them had known before; casual, relaxed, and unthreatened. Even though Frances had carefully scripted Rebecca, they 72

CARI BEAUCHAMP created as they went along and Mickey happily layered in their "spontaneous combustion." They were working with a new cameraman, Walter Stradling, and the baby spot Mary had discovered during The Poor Little Rich Girl was used to the extreme in Rebecca ofSunnybrook Farm. Yet overall there was an atmosphere of equality and their genuine affection was reflected in their nonsensical nicknames for each other; Mickey referred to Mary as "Tad" and Frances started a lifetime habit of calling her "Squeebie." They had the time of their lives and with Mickey twenty-six, Frances twenty-eight, and Mary all of twenty-five, they were the kids who had taken over the candy store.33 If the threesome ever wanted to be reminded of what "normal" filmmaking was, they only had to look over to the next set, where Cecil B. DeMille was directing the Metropolitan Opera diva Geraldine Farrar as an Aztec princess in The Woman God Forgot. Pyramid temples and gilded, feathered costumes made their gingham dresses and the barnyard set pale in comparison and DeMille looked on them with disdain tinged with pity.34 It is difficult to imagine two directors more different in style and content than Cecil DeMille and Mickey Neilan. While both men began in the business as actors, DeMille created a flamboyant air that included dramatically capitalizing the first letter of his last name, in contrast to the rest of his family. His official title at Famous Players Lasky was "Director General" and his office featured stained-glass windows and a beamed roof reminiscent of a cathedral. DeMille stomped around his sets in knee-high boots with his megaphone, used up to a dozen portable telephones, and an entourage followed in his wake to meet any need that might arise.35 Mickey would often first appear on the set after lunch suffering the effects of a bender the night before. If Mary and Frances were initially irritated, he soon had them laughing at his excuses and in one short afternoon, he could accomplish what would take another director days. "Mickey was one of the most delightful, aggravating, gifted, and charming human beings I have ever met. There were times when I could cheerfully have throttled him," Mary claimed forty years later. "But I can truthfully say that no director, not even the great D. W. Griffith or Cecil B. DeMille, could wring the performance from me that Mickey did." Mary would always respect DeMille as a great craftsman and he admired her as a "good trouper," but the choice she had made was obvious.36 Frances decided DeMille was "either intensely disliked, with an element of fear thrown in, or looked up to with blind loyalty." If she was in awe of anyone, it was his scenarist Jeanie Macpherson. Five years older than Frances, Jeanie had been born in Boston and studied opera in Paris before acting on the stage and in films for Griffith. It was suggested at the time 73

WITHOUT LYING DOWN that the love letters she sent to him were the cause of the breakup of Griffith's first marriage. A dark, red-haired beauty, Macpherson had acted in and directed several films for Universal when DeMille cast her in The Rose of the Rancho in 1914. She started writing for him shortly thereafter and her affair with the married director was common knowledge, seemingly accepted, if not condoned, by everyone, including DeMille's adoring wife, Constance. Jeanie and C.B. had adjoining suites at the studio and unlike other writers who worked on the lot or in unadorned offices, hers was paneled in redwood bark to resemble the seclusion of a mountain cabin. Yet there was never any inference that Jeanie was hired because of their affair and not her talent; DeMille would have many mistresses, but few scenario writers.37 Frances was unlikely to condemn any relationship. Besides, when it came to affairs with married men, Mary Pickford was almost glowing with happiness over her relationship with Douglas Fairbanks.

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y the summer of 1917, Douglas Fairbanks had skyrocketed to fame. It had been a year and a half since he had met Mary and while he had been immediately taken with her, she was attracted slowly as they saw each other at various functions, often in the company of their respective spouses. They shared a unique experience in their mutual stardom and Doug sought Mary's advice about dealing with Zukor and Lasky, but it had not been until Doug's mother died in December of 1916 that the relationship changed from friendship to intimacy. Doug was heading east on the train when his mother passed away in New York. They had been estranged at the end and he walked numbly through the funeral, unable to express any grief or emotion. Mary sent him a sympathy note and he called and asked if they could talk. They drove through Central Park and during their conversation, he broke down and sobbed in her arms. How much this experience with Douglas, as Mary always called him, had to do with her burst of suicidal depression a few weeks later is speculative at best, but Mary had now seen this strong man vulnerable and she was enraptured. She would soon learn he too was the product of a fatherless family with a desperation for the limelight.1 He had been born Douglas Elton Thomas Ulman in Denver, Colorado, in 1883, the fourth and last of Ella Marsh Fairbanks Wilcox Ulman's sons. He was her second son by her third husband, H. (for Hezekiah) Charles Ulman, the lawyer to whom she had turned while seeking a divorce from husband number two, Judge Wilcox of Georgia. Ulman left a wife and a law practice in New York to move to Denver and marry Ella, but he had traveled and drunk his way out of her life by the time Doug was five. Ella took back the last name of her first husband, John Fairbanks, who had died of tuberculosis shortly after the birth of her first son, and gave all the other boys his name as well. Relatively dark-skinned at birth and an embarrassment to his mother, Doug learned early the joys of the attention that resulted when he recited verse, showed off his athletic abilities, or took parts in school plays. At the 75

WITHOUT LYING DOWN age of sixteen, he signed with the Frederick Warde stock company and toured the country for almost two years. In 1906, Ella joined her youngest son in New York, where he was an established actor with his name on marquees. That same year he met nineteen-year-old "plump, pretty, blonde" Beth Sully, who, as the daughter of "The Cotton King of Wall Street," lived the lifestyle to which Doug aspired and Ella had always believed they deserved. A year later, Doug and his shy, adoring Beth were taking their honeymoon in Europe, a wedding present from her parents.2 Doug was working successfully on the New York stage when he was approached by Harry and Roy Aitken to appear on the screen. The Aitken brothers had taken the fortune they made financing The Birth of a Nation and formed the Triangle film company, uniting the popular directors D. W. Griffith, Mack Sennett, and Thomas Ince all under one roof. They combed Broadway for talent and had already signed De Wolf Hopper, Billie Burke, and Weber and Fields when they approached the lesser-known Fairbanks with an offer of $2,000 a week for ten weeks.3 He had made a dozen films since, most of them directed by John Emerson from scripts written by Anita Loos, and there was no denying his star quality. Loos and Emerson created situations that allowed him to jump and run and swing, giving vent to his natural athletic abilities and buoyant personality. In January of 1917 Doug formed his own company under the Lasky-Zukor banner and when Mary and Frances returned to California that spring, they were working at the same studio.4 At first, Frances was content to see Mary so happy. Frances thought Owen put Mary down to build himself up where Doug saw being with her as a verification of his own worth. He listened to Mary and valued her opinion. Owen was attractive, almost pretty, but slight in contrast to Doug's strong physical presence. Although he was only about five foot eight, Doug radiated a charisma and sureness of his manliness that captivated Mary.5 As their affair blossomed, much of their energy went to keeping the romance a secret. There was, as always, the image to be maintained; they were both married to other people and Doug had a young son as well. Although only eight at the time, Doug junior clearly remembers the first time he. met Mary. He was playing with his train set on the living room floor when his father brought Mary home to tea. His mother introduced this young woman as "America's Sweetheart" and he wondered "how did such a little girl, only a little bit taller than I, get to be so important and go places alone?" Yet when she bent down on her knees and asked if she too could play with his trains, "Mary had made another conquest." From that point on, Doug junior might be estranged from his father or clash with his mother, but he always viewed Mary as a friend and a "co-conspirator."6 76

CARI BEAUCHAMP As enamored of Mary as Douglas was, he was not anxious to make any outward changes. Beth Sully Fairbanks was as much a mother and a manager for her husband as she was a wife—qualities he was not quick to discard. He thought it proper that to Beth the sun rose and set on him, but he needed even more. He "thrived only on the unbroken popularity of everyone," says Margaret Case Harriman, daughter of the Algonquin owner, who knew Fairbanks all her life. She liked him enormously, but was clear about his limitations. "Douglas Fairbanks was a man who never read anything. Even his method of deciding on scripts was to glance over them rapidly and then hand them to someone more fond of reading than he. ... It was not a lack of intelligence or intellectual curiosity that prevented him, simply the fact that he couldn't bear to sit still long enough. Father once said to me, in a bewildered kind of way, 4I don't know how I can be so fond of a man who has never read a book.' "7 So for those who knew Doug, it was amusing when a monthly column appeared under his byline in Photoplay in 1917, laced with self-deprecating humor and advocating "clean living." Then he published a book entitled Laugh and Live, preaching optimism and "useful advice" such as to marry young and stay faithful.8 Frances found the blatant hypocrisy offensive and wondered if his insincerity extended to his relationship with Mary. But when she raised the possibility that she was being used by him, Mary was more than annoyed. "You have yours," she retorted, "why shouldn't I have mine?" Close women friends knew Frances frankly enjoyed "jumping into bed with a man" she found particularly attractive and chided her for her "weakness," but she defended herself by saying, "If you do the wrong thing at the right time you'll have no regrets about having missed a snitch of fun." Still, she cautioned Mary, "sin was not recognized as sin unless you were caught in the act" and with the complications of having a husband and a very public image, she was more likely to get caught. Her words brought only a frosty response from Mary and she knew she should keep her mouth shut until she was asked her opinion.9 Frances had to admit there were benefits to the affair: Mary was more cheerful than ever and while she had always thought of Mary as pretty, when "she was with Doug she actually looked sexy." The situation also brought Frances in closer contact with Doug's scenario writer, Anita Loos. Their paths had crossed in New York, but in their active participation in keeping the romance hidden, they became friends. They used a variety of ruses, such as Mary and Frances making a public point of going horseback riding together and then as prearranged, secretly 77

WITHOUT LYING DOWN meeting Doug, who was riding with Anita. Doug and Mary went off, usually to his brother's house nearby, and Frances and Anita rode together for an hour or two, then reunited with Doug and Mary before returning to the stables.10 Anita and Frances shared a variety of sensibilities, including their mixed emotions about Mary and Doug's relationship and their belief in their own good fortune for being a highly paid part of this movie business. Anita too had spent her formative years in San Francisco, moving there from Shasta when she was four. Her father held a variety of jobs related to the theater and Anita took to the stage at an early age. The family moved on to Los Angeles and then San Diego, where Anita watched the one-reelers shown between the live acts at her father's theater and quickly ascertained a difference in their quality: the ones labeled Biograph were almost always superior. Copying the address from the film can labels, she sent off several story ideas to 11 East 14th Street in New York and to her everlasting joy and pride, back came a check for twenty-five dollars. The third one she sold, The New York Hat, was to be Mary Pickford's last film for Griffith.11 When Frank Dougherty of Biograph in New York wrote that he was coming to Los Angeles in January of 1914 and "would like to have a personal interview" with her, she was enthusiastic at the prospect. She took the two-hour train ride up the coast with her mother, but when they arrived at the makeshift studio, D. W. Griffith was in the middle of filming Judith of Bethulia and Minnie Loos was so convinced it was a den of iniquity, she returned Anita posthaste to San Diego. Although not quite five feet tall and looking much younger, Anita was twenty-six years old and had already proven herself capable of supporting herself. Yet the times and her own attitude mandated her obedience to her mother's rare ultimatum: "I'll never let you go back into that studio."12 Anita found comfort at the local library, where she was influenced in equal measure by Spinoza, Kant, and Voltaire and the society sections of East Coast newspapers, and she used the nearby Hotel del Coronado, already famous as a winter resort for the rich, as a laboratory for experimenting with relationships. She had a series of wealthy boyfriends, including the heir to a Detroit fortune and the son of a United States senator, but she quickly realized men bored her as soon as they proclaimed their interest in her and she realized she was a complete failure as a gold digger. She continued to send off her scripts to Biograph but kept her paychecks secret after several of her boyfriends made it clear they were threatened by her accomplishments. While her opinion of men in general and the rich in particular went down a few more notches, she began to plot her "escape by an archaic method that belonged back in the generation of my poor help78

CARI BEAUCHAMP less mother." In retrospect, Anita said, "I separated the men from the boys and purposely chose a boy" and recalled trying to back out of "the larcenous arrangement" at the last moment, but her mother wouldn't budge because "I've already ordered the cake."13 When Anita retold the story in later years she claimed her marriage lasted all of one awful night in a bungalow at the del Coronado and then she ran home to her parents. In reality, her marriage to Frank Pallma, a five-foot-tall composer and musician, lasted several months. When Anita did return to her mother, however, Minnie's attitude was primarily one of relief that her daughter had lost her virginity in a respectable way and she saw no further impediment to her working in the movies. Griffith was now at Triangle, busy building the sets for Intolerance, but welcomed Anita as a full-time writer. She quickly found her niche writing for Doug Fairbanks, confident that she was finally where she belonged.14 Like Frances, Anita made light of her scriptwriting, saying that once the plot was developed, "it was a breeze" and she had so much fun, it was almost a crime to be paid for it. But also like Frances, Anita got up before dawn to write and agonized over the words she chose. Frances preferred dictating, in part because the secretary was an audience whose reaction she could gauge, but most often she and Anita wrote by hand on long yellow pads. Both also claimed never to learn to type, as if the skill would make their careers and success appear premeditated, but in reality they were seen using typewriters on occasion.15 Their similar outlooks extended to their sensitivity about their lack of extensive formal education, and both were prolific readers. Anita worked at being a natural wit and might have been a little more confident about her work than Frances and Frances was a little more comfortable in her own skin than Anita, but they were both uniquely disciplined workers in a Hollywood full of diversions and their friendship flourished. Marie Dressier returned to California in the fall of 1917, forced by economic necessity to give up her farm and go to work. The newspapers reported she had formed her own company in partnership with "her manager and husband," James Dalton, and signed with Goldwyn to make eight two-reel comedies. Frances was troubled by the turn in her friend's career and didn't laugh when Marie joked that in these new short films, based again on a character named Tillie, "plot would be replaced by pies." As always, Marie protested that she had never been happier.16 Frances tended to be so loyal to her women friends that she didn't trust the men they were with, and Jim Dalton was no exception. Despite the press accounts that he was Marie's husband, Jim had yet to get the divorce he kept promising, but after Marie's cold response to her warnings, Frances 79

WITHOUT LYING DOWN knew that whatever Jim turned out to be, nothing she said would make the slightest difference. All she could do was hope for the best.17 And Frances was reminded once again that she was in no position to make judgments about relationships when on August 21, 1917, she was served with papers informing her that Robert Pike was suing "Marion Owens Pike, also known as Frances Marion Pike," for divorce on grounds of desertion. When she did not respond, Robert was granted an uncontested interlocutory decree in Superior Court in San Francisco in early November.18 That same week, Photoplay hit the stands with a four-page spread called "Frances Marion: Soldieress of Fortune." This was the first major piece just on her in a fan magazine and the coverage marked a new plateau for her career. The article featured glamorous photographs of Frances, played up her San Francisco background, praised her writing and artistic abilities, and featured several self-deprecating quotes. It presented a composite picture of a beauty with humor, brains, and an awe-inspiring salary. No mention was made of any marriages.19 In the midst of this publicity, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm became the smash success she and Mary had hoped for and with it Mary said she "gained back the ground I had lost." As Frances was writing the script for Mary's next picture, A Little Princess, a young man from the casting office called to say he was bringing over "a maiden fairer than Aphrodite" for her consideration. He walked in a few minutes later escorting a thin, awkward teenage girl with enormous eyes and Frances's first reaction was that her fluttering hands and pinched face made her look like "a trapped little animal." But when the man said, "beauty like this should not go unnoticed," Frances threw him out of her office and admonished the young girl, now with tears in her eyes, to "pay no attention."20 "Tell me about yourself," Frances said in an effort to make her comfortable. Without any evidence of self-pity, the visitor talked of her early childhood in Kansas, her father's death when she was five, and her mother's decision to move the family to Santa Cruz, a small beach town on the northern California coast. Her mother and her two older brothers were now running a boardinghouse in the summer and she was in Los Angeles looking to work as an extra. She had appeared in the background of the circus scene in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and was hoping for a small part in whatever Mary was doing next. She had tried the casting offices of every studio in town and while she had found a few small parts, the highlight of her experience so far was actually meeting the great Griffith himself. He had told her she looked too much like Lilian Gish to be in any of his pictures and it was the nicest thing anyone had ever said to her. Her mother 80

CARI BEAUCHAMP had created an appellation in honor of her two maiden aunts, Eliza and Susan, and named her ZaSu Pitts. As Frances watched and listened to the young ZaSu, she didn't know whether to laugh or cry and it occurred to her that others might be touched the same way. There was a key part in A Little Princess for a young maid called a slavey and when Frances told Mary the full story, ZaSu was given the role.21 Frances's scenario for A Little Princess was sixty pages of detailed stage directions, camera angles, and titles utilizing fantasy sequences a la Tourneur to illustrate the stories from the Arabian Nights Mary's character Sara Crewe uses to entertain the other girls at boarding school. Premiered on November 5, 1917, A Little Princess packed the Strand theater and once again the rave reviews poured in for Mary's "flawless" acting. Moving Picture World was not the only one to make special mention of the actress playing the young slavey; "Watch ZaSu Pitts, for she is a coming star."22 While having over a month to work on each scenario was a new luxury for Frances, she was on a constant lookout for script material. In the evenings she often read out loud as Mary spent the obligatory hour washing and setting her hair; always sensitive to her lack of education, Mary was comfortable having Frances read to her without fear of being condescended to or judged.23 It was during one of their informal sessions that Frances read the novel The Star of the Sea by William Locke about two polar-opposite teenage orphans: the rich but crippled Stella Maris, "a figure of wondrous beauty," and Unity Blake, "a victim of cruel fate, deformed, but equally beautiful of soul." Stella lives in luxury, protected from the realities of the world by her titled aunt and uncle. Her reason for living becomes the handsome journalist John Risca, who visits her daily, and it is not until she is operated on and walks again that she learns John is "burdened by a drink-crazed wife" who is in jail for beating the orphan who worked for them, Unity Blake. Out of pity and guilt, John adopts Unity, who also comes to love John and she knows that when his wife is released, his happiness with Stella will end. Unity commits the "ultimate act of sacrifice" by killing the wife and then herself, leaving John a note explaining, "You was the only one as was ever kind to me. God bless you and Miss Stella Maris and make you happy."24 It was fairly strong, serious material and Frances was surprised when Mary announced her determination to play both roles. Closeting herself to dress in her Unity costume, Mary appeared with her hair greased down, a slumped shoulder, and little makeup and it took even Frances a minute to recognize the pathetic little figure standing in the doorway.25 Adolph Zukor came to the set and "the look of dismay on the poor man's 81

WITHOUT LYING DOWN face was something to see," Mary said. "I had to pacify him that I died early in the picture." Zukor replied, "The sooner the better!" Stella Maris brought a new pinnacle of acclaim for Mary's dramatic talents, particularly for her role as Unity Blake. Without padding or props, Mary maintained the limp, a slumped shoulder, and a twisted mouth throughout all her scenes, and the fact that a beautiful actress willingly slicked down her hair with Vaseline to look so plain brought unprecedented praise. "Stella Maris should prove a turning point in the history of America's favorite star," Photoplay proclaimed. "The public will never again be satisfied with plays in which Miss Pickford is not given an opportunity to act."26 Mickey Neilan came in for his share of plaudits and the cameraman Walter Stradling was applauded for his technical achievements in the scenes where Unity and Stella share the screen. Yet Frances's name was mentioned rarely, even when the scenario was praised for "rising far above the novel through pure artistry of development."27 Paramount put the full resources of its publicity department behind the film, and theater owners received sample postcards to send customers, suggestions for store tie-ins, and life-size cardboard cutouts of Mary. Alfred A. Cohn, who had written articles praising Mary, Doug, and Mickey for Photoplay, was hired as Mary's personal publicist. Cohn prided himself in having friends in high places, such as President Wilson's personal secretary Joseph Tumulty, and his contacts culminated in Paramount's sending out pictures of President Wilson saying, "I have to thank you for the opportunity of witnessing Stella Maris, a production which I am sure will hearten the nation at this time of crisis. Its theme of woman's lofty ideals has an irresistible appeal and its portrayal of all phases of life must be an incentive for good and loving deeds."28 Even accepting that the president of the United States would allow himself to be used in publicity for a film, how murder and suicide were considered "incentive for good and loving deeds" is beyond comprehension. Still, the promotion underscored two facts: Mary's image was unassailable and everything, even Stella Marts, was being tied to the war, or, as it was becoming known, "this crisis." As American men began dying on the battlefields of Europe, attention to the war effort increased. Frances was shocked when the studio bosses expressed their enthusiasm for the war as a boon to business; people were in need of diversion and "our theaters will be packed to the rafters." At first, they tried to balance the content of their films to keep their European markets open in spite of the war, but by late 1917 that was impossible. Support for the war had grown slowly and many of the studio chiefs were vulnerable 82

CARI BEAUCHAMP to criticism as immigrants resisting the confrontation against their original homelands. As a result, Mary became a "super-patriot" and theaters were soon flooded with "Kill the Hun" movies. Audiences were urged to "Come and hiss the Kaiser! Everybody is doing it!" and scenarios started to lose all subtlety. With titles like To Hell with the Kaiser, The Kaiser's Finish, and The Kaiser-The Beast of Berlin, Hollywood had a new villain.29 The exception was once again D. W. Griffith, who was approached by the British government to make a film promoting the Allied cause. "Despising the pro-war propaganda," Griffith went to England in the spring of 1917 aiming to make "a much more elevated kind of film." The result was Hearts of the World, focusing on the effects of the war's devastation on civilians, and it became one the most popular films of the year.30 The press and the movies were the only major outreach mechanisms to the citizenry; the government knew it and the producers knew it. Studio heads had gathered in New York within a month of America's declaration of war to organize their efforts, and William Brady, as president of the National Association of the Motion Picture Industry, was named chair of the group's executive committee. Working hand in hand with the government, Brady said, would lead to "the advancement and widespread influence and power for the good of the screen in a common interest." Adolph Zukor was named to head the committee on bond subscriptions and immediately pledged Famous Players Lasky to buy $100,000 worth of bonds. Who could question the patriotism or the purity of an industry so behind its government in time of crisis?31 While actors were privately assured by their studios that they would receive deferments, the pressure was felt just the same. Paramount's heartthrob Wallace Reid received his deferment because he had a six-week-old son, but Doug Fairbanks's stardom was based in large part on his heroics— how could he excuse himself from serving? He consulted Mary and became actively and very publicly involved in the war effort. He bought $100,000 of bonds himself and after completing Reaching for the Moon, he gave his staff a vacation while he took off with his wife and son on a coast-to-coast train trip to sell bonds. He spent two days in New York making dozens of appearances and by the time the train returned to Los Angeles, it was reported that he was personally responsible for selling over a million dollars' worth of liberty bonds. The government announced that Fairbanks was more effective serving at home than abroad and no one could doubt his patriotism.32 Mary "adopted" an entire battalion of six hundred soldiers from the California Field Artillery. She announced that she intended "to see to it that the boys receive plenty of tobacco and candy" and when the men went 83

WITHOUT LYING DOWN overseas, they were each given a locket "containing a picture of their petite protector."33 Charles Chaplin was an English citizen, but it was reported that he was "unable to serve" because he was "under sized" with a twenty-six-inch chest. Instead, he joined Doug in his bond selling and other charity events and Mary was the referee when Fairbanks and Chaplin staged a burlesque fistfight in Los Angeles to benefit London's French American Hospital. When the three highest-paid and most popular film stars appeared together, records were set for bond sales.34 For a while, it worked well for everyone; the stars got the publicity, the government raised unheard-of sums of money, and the movie industry looked like the most patriotic business in the country. Marie Dressier was another popular attraction at the bond rallies, alone or appearing with "The Big Three." When Frances accompanied them, she was troubled to see Doug snub Marie, "acting as if she was a has-been" and unworthy of sharing the same platform with them. His snobbishness seemed almost innate and he was heard referring to his fans as "boll weevils." Frances knew that Mary was very much in love with Doug and worried that their joint public appearances would spur the growing rumors about their relationship.35 Charlotte Pickford agreed with Frances and had not wanted Mary to go on a bond-selling tour at all. First, she was afraid of the crowds, remembering their brush with disaster at the opening of The Poor Little Rich Girl And she did not think Mary's image needed polishing. "Our Mary's" picture was everywhere and her films were making a fortune. Charlotte went along as chaperon on the bond tours, but when Mary told Owen she was going, he viciously accused her of caring only for herself: "You don't fool me, Mary, with your patriotic palaver; it's only a clever publicity stunt to attract more attention to yourself." Frances believed that Mary truly "felt it was her duty to serve," and listening to Owen's sneering remarks, she knew she was witnessing "the last tendril of feeling that Mary had for the man she had married in her teens."36 There were other effects of the war beyond Charlotte's control. When Jack Pickford was drafted as a citizen of Canada, he immediately joined the United States Navy, where he was "assigned to the intelligence division and given the task of censoring films for export." Before he left for Washington, Jack announced his plans to marry his latest good-time girl and the newest Triangle star, the beautiful Olive Thomas.37 Olive had come to New York with a girlfriend on vacation in 1913 and found it so much fun she couldn't stay away. Still in her teens, she left a husband and a three-dollars-a-week job at a Pittsburgh department store to try 84

CARI BEAUCHAMP her luck modeling. She quickly rose to fame as a Ziegfeld girl and with her long brown curls and a flashing smile, the artist Harrison Fisher dubbed her "the most beautiful girl in America." Overnight, Olive Thomas could name her price, and Triangle made the best offer.38 Olive and Jack were two of a kind; he had reportedly started collecting lovers at the age of fifteen when he was taken in by the Ziegfeld beauty Lillian Lorraine. Olive's experiences included her boss Flo Ziegfeld and she had accumulated a substantial jewelry collection as mementos.39 Charlotte and Mary were not at all enthusiastic about Jack's plans for marriage. His mother said, "You're too young to be married," and Mary added, "Please wait until you have built up your career." As talented as some friends genuinely believed he was, his career was hindered by the Pickford name and his utter lack of discipline. Jack just wanted to have fun and sister Lottie was all for it. "Go ahead," she said, the only familial voice to encourage the wedding. "Love is all we can expect out of life," and Jack went off to Washington a married man.40 Poor eyesight prevented Mickey Neilan from enlisting in the aviation corps, but after M'Liss was completed in the spring of 1918, he decided to return to New York to direct George M. Cohan. The five films he had made with Frances and Mary constituted one of the longest professional relationships in his career and marked a level of success that was never to be seen again.41 There were changes in Doug's film unit as well. His chief cameraman, Victor Fleming, was drafted and in October, Fairbanks announced that Ruth Allen, a writer who had been working with him for several months, was being promoted to head the scenario department, which included Anita Loos. Mary's old director Allan Dwan was to alternate with John Emerson in directing and shortly thereafter Emerson and Loos left Fairbanks's company to produce their own Paramount productions.42 Emerson had cultivated the press and he and Anita were played up as the brains behind Fairbanks's success. Emerson believed in hiring his own publicity agents, fairly uncommon for directors at that time, and while Anita claimed to be "appalled," she willingly posed for pictures. A six-part series ran in Photoplay under their byline and Doug tired of seeing himself billed with Emerson and Loos as equals in a "a triple alliance." John Emerson complained of throat problems in the first of many physical ailments that flared up whenever situations were not to his liking. Anita, in love with the seemingly indifferent director fifteen years her senior, went with him to New York to see medical specialists.43 With everyone else on the move, Frances filled in writing He Comes Up Smiling for Fairbanks and The Goat for Donald Crisp, and when her friend 85

WITHOUT LYING DOWN Sessue Hayakawa formed his own company, she wrote him a melodrama, The Temple of Dusk. She finished adapting Captain Kidd, Jr. for Mary and saw her through the transition to a new director. William Desmond Taylor had started in the business as an actor with Thomas Ince, and then moved to directing, first with Balboa and then American in Santa Barbara, where he had worked with both Lottie and Jack Pickford. Taylor was never to be the close friend Mickey was, but he was experienced, had worked with the family, and was welcomed accordingly.44 But for Frances, the joy and the challenge of being on the set each day with Mary and Mickey were gone. Her frustration over her own lack of participation in the war effort was building and she wondered how she could criticize the bosses' attitude if she wasn't actively involved herself. Elsie Janis wrote from France, where she was entertaining the troops, and urged her to "get out of that artificial Hollywood atmosphere into life that is real, ghastly, forbidding, terrifying and magnificent," and Frances's desire to go overseas was cemented by reading Mary Roberts Rinehart's latest novel, The Amazing Interlude. The story of a young American woman volunteer in a Belgian soup kitchen moved Frances to investigate the possibility of working with the Salvation Army in France. She even made contact with her old employer the San Francisco Examiner, suggesting that as a correspondent she could cover the activities of the women in the war and performers entertaining the troops.45 She talked to Mary about her new ambitions and Mary offered to help while asking for a favor. The government was encouraging movies that would inspire enlistments and she proposed filming Rupert Hughes's short story "The Mobilization of Johanna." If Frances stayed just long enough to write it, she would ask Al Cohn to use his Washington contacts to get her an appointment as an official government war correspondent. Frances never could say no to Mary.

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ary Pickford was married to one man and in love with another, but she still had an eye for a handsome face. In her position as their honorary colonel, she reviewed the troops of the 143rd Field Artillery and blew a special silver whistle to start the camp football game. On the field and at the dinner at the Hotel del Coronado that February evening in 1918, Mary spotted a six-foot-two, blue-eyed, sandy-haired fullback whose chiseled features stood out even in a crowd of good-looking men. She was careful to position herself next to him for the team picture. Mary returned to Camp Kearney with Frances a few weeks later to finalize the arrangements for the 143rd's appearance in Johanna Enlists. The two women toured the base hospital because Mary's "find" from the previous visit was recovering from a broken leg. Frances had to agree that Fred Thomson was something to look at and while Mary went on with her "colonel's duties," Frances stayed behind to talk with the handsome patient. The lieutenant had just turned twenty-eight when Frances, almost thirty, met him at Camp Kearney and she soon realized he was no ordinary man; Frederick Clifton Thomson was the chaplain of the 143rd and a world champion athlete.1 Frances went to church only to get married or to witness someone else doing the same and while she still rode horses occasionally, she had no interest in sports. Had she ever read the sports section, she might have recognized Fred, for he had run, hurdled, and thrown his way to the title of All Around Champion Athlete of the World at the National Amateur Athletic Union's Field and Track Championship in Chicago in 1910. Since he was a native of Pasadena, the local papers often ran articles under his byline about the virtues of clean living.2 But as Fred and Frances spent the afternoon talking, they realized they had met their respective match. He was welUread and a musician and mathematician by avocation with a breadth of knowledge she had rarely encountered—certainly never in someone so good-looking. 87

WITHOUT LYING DOWN "No one had written more satirically about 'love at first sight' than I," Frances admitted, but that night she told Mary it had happened to her. She knew that if she had penned such a scene it would have been discarded as too far-fetched, but the truth was that the experienced and sophisticated writer had fallen in love with a straitlaced, God-fearing Boy Scout.3 Behind the smiling, competent, and assured veneer, there was a complicated man who, as the third of four brothers, had been beaten by his minister father, "always in the name of God." He had grown up aiming to please, watching and then weaving his way through the patterns of behavior that would result in peace, yet developing his own moral compass, a strong backbone, and a list of very real accomplishments.4 Fred Thomson's mother, Clara, was a four-foot-eleven-inch powerhouse, the only survivor of thirteen children after her father caught tuberculosis and fatally infected all her brothers and sisters. Clara had married a medical student, James Harrison Thomson, on what turned out to be his deathbed and, a young widow overnight, she went on to Wooster College in Ohio. She earned her master's degree by cataloging their library, then she and her mother, Anna, joined fellow Indianians in a group purchase of property in southern California. There Clara was reunited with her dead husband's younger brother, Williell, a brilliant, troubled man who had attended Hanover College, taught school, and studied law before graduating from Presbyterian Seminary in Danville, Kentucky. He continued his studies at the San Francisco Theological Seminary and reencountered his sister-in-law while serving as the minister at Santa Monica Presbyterian Church. They were married in December of 1882.5 The Thomsons built a large house on the comer of Columbia and Fair Oaks in Pasadena. Their widowed mothers lived with them, and Clara and Williell became active in the community, circulating antisaloon petitions and helping found Sierra Madre College. Clara read Greek and Latin and taught school, but her immediate focus was on what she called her "four stairsteps": Henry Lyon Thomson, born in 1885 when Clara was thirty-five, followed by Williell junior in 1888, Frederick Clifton in January of 1890, and Samuel Harrison in 1895. Williell continued to work as a pastor, and also as a surveyor, civil engineer, teacher, and a superintendent of the Pasadena Street Railway Company. He wandered from job to job, never particularly successful at any of them, and it was Clara's strong will that held the family together. Everything and everyone was expected to function and behave within very strict guidelines to be worthy of her attention, let alone her approval. Entering first grade at the age of four, Fred set himself on a steady course to win approval at school and avoid punishment at home. His mother's idea 88

CARI BEAUCHAMP of high praise was to tell him that he was "fairly obedient and never obtrusive," yet he flourished academically and excelled in everything athletic. Acclaimed as the star fullback of the Occidental Academy High School football team, he was accepted at Occidental College as a sixteen-year-old freshman and played all four years for the varsity team. He won event after event, local championship after local championship, and the Los Angeles Herald declared "Thomson was practically the Occidental team," but good grades and athletic awards weren't enough for Clara Thomson.6 Musical instruction at home was a daily occurrence and Fred was also active in the YMCA, played in the college band, joined the literary society, worked on the staff of the college yearbook, and served as student body president his senior year. After graduating from Occidental and a brief stint as the director of the Long Beach YMCA, Fred decided to follow his father and older brother Williell in becoming a Presbyterian minister. It was the summer before he entered Princeton Theological Seminary that Fred was first heralded as "the All Around Champion Athlete of the World," winning the AAU National Championship by accumulating the most points in a series of events—the 100-yard dash, the shot put, high jump, 880-yard walk, hammer throw, 120-yard hurdles, pole vault, throwing a fifty-pound weight, the one-mile run, and the broad jump. 7 He played football for Princeton and represented the college when he defended his title as National All Around Athlete at the AAU meet of 1911, again held in Chicago. He scored a total of 6,709 points, exactly 500 more than his nearest competitor, yet after completing his second year of seminary, "the red blooded divinity scholar" announced on his return home to Los Angeles in the spring of 1912 that he would not enter the Olympics.8 Although he was "almost certain to make the team," Fred was morally opposed to competitions held on Sundays and the Olympic schedule in Stockholm would have challenged those convictions. Still, he claimed the primary reason for his decision was that "I have spent two of my summers at athletics and will not give up all my time to sports again this year. While I would very much like to make the trip, I cannot see my way clear to do it. I will spend the summer practicing my profession, preaching."9 Fred served as pastor at Peck Memorial Chapel in Washington, D.C., in July and August of 1912. He stayed in training during his final year of seminary and competed in various AAU National meets, beating not only his own record but those set by Jim Thorpe in the Olympics only months before, and then won the National Championships one more time when they were held at the University of Southern California in July of 1913. As the three-time champion, he formally ended his athletic career, turning all his energies to his ministry. 89

WITHOUT LYING DOWN His father had died that spring and Williell junior, who had served as a missionary in Chile for a year, now left the ministry to teach Spanish at Occidental College. Fred replaced him as the pastor at Hope Chapel in Los Angeles, more dedicated to his calling than ever and writing a fourteenweek series of articles in the Los Angeles Evening Herald advocating training, dedication, and, as always, "clean living."10 Fred also resumed his relationship with his college sweetheart, Gail DuBois Jepson, a pretty, soft-spoken young woman who had become a teacher after graduating from Occidental. His father had expressed concern that with a history of tuberculosis, Gail was not physically strong enough to keep up with Fred, but the couple were formally engaged on August 1, 1913, and within the next two months, he was ordained by the Presbytery of Los Angeles and they became the Reverend and Mrs. Frederick Clifton Thomson.11 Gail fell into the role of preacher's wife, playing the piano and teaching Sunday school. They were assigned to the Presbyterian Church of Goldfield, Nevada, a remote mining town on the edge of Death Valley halfway between Carson City and Las Vegas. Fred preached in the local Presbyterian and Methodist churches and his work throughout the state as Nevada's commissioner of the Boy Scouts of America, an organization created only a few years earlier, demanded much of his time and gave him the most satisfaction. In June of 1916 they were called home to Pasadena because Williell junior was ill and dying. He had been diagnosed the year before with leukemia, but the death of his adored older brother at twenty-seven was a shock to Fred. Gail stayed on with her family to recover from a flare-up of her tuberculosis and soon after Fred was notified it had developed into meningitis. He just missed the train that stopped at Goldfield only once a week and frantically borrowed a motorcycle to ride to Pasadena, but lost his way in the desert for a day before finally arriving almost twenty-four hours after Gail had died at home in her sleep.12 Fred returned to Goldfield, but within months the United States entered the war and he quickly decided to enlist. He visited his mother for a few days before heading for the Los Angeles recruiting office. He had been gone from the area for over a year, but he was still a popular personality and his picture headed a two-column article in the Los Angeles Tribune announcing "Fred Thomson to Act as U.S. Army Chaplain" and his enlistment was used to recruit other young, athletic men.13 Fred was commissioned as a second lieutenant and assigned to Battery F of the 143rd Field Artillery, stationed first in Arcadia and then Camp Kearney. He served as chaplain to 1,200 men and ran the Regimental Exchange, organized sporting events, conducted religious services, served as general 90

CARI BEAUCHAMP counsel for the enlisted men, and helped in determining "whether or not the soldier is receiving just and fair treatment from the officer." It was as the regiment's star fullback that he broke the leg that put him in the hospital when Frances came to visit and decided to change her plans. She had agreed to write the scenario for Johanna Enlists, but after meeting Fred "I became so conscientious about my work that I decided to stay and supervise the entire production."14 Rupert Hughes's original story begins, "Johanna Renssler is a homely spiteful stupid lazy young girl of nineteen who lives with her pa and ma on an isolated farm. They are ashamed of her and never allow her to meet any men." Obviously, changes had to be made for a starring vehicle for Mary Pickford, and Frances's version introduces "Johanna, pretty little daughter of a backwoods farmer who sighs for romance for all she knows is drudgery."15 Just as in A Girl's Folly, the heroine "prays for a beau to be sent to her," but this time an entire regiment arrives to encamp at the family farm. Frances has a mischievous Mary smiling serenely as she sits on the fence "reviewing the troops," certain they are marching only so she can make her choice. After the obligatory complications and comic misadventures, Mary rides off into the sunset with her captain, played by Douglas MacLean, and the regiment in the background is the 143rd. When his leg healed, Fred managed a brief leave and visited Frances at the studio in Los Angeles. They had known each other less than a month, but were already making plans to marry as soon as the war was over. Fred claimed not to care about her past, but insisted on following his own moral code; he would not sleep with her until after they were married.16 With Fred as added inspiration, Frances was more determined than ever to be assigned overseas. A government commission offered her the greatest opportunity to travel unimpeded, so with Mary's and Al Cohn's help, she headed to Washington and an appointment with George Creel, head of the Committee on Public Information [CPI], the same week Fred began his trip to France. Neutrality had been the official American position for so long, the CPI's challenge was to shift popular sentiment to support a state of war. Wilson's reelection the previous November had been due in large part to keeping the country out of international conflicts and as late as January of 1917, he was advocating the possibility of a negotiated end to what was still called the European War. When increased German submarine attacks against American ships threatened the flow of trade and endangered the boost the war had brought to the American economy, the opinions of the powers that be shifted, but declaring war alone did not bring support from the population at large. Enthusiasm for the war effort was so lackluster that although it was esti91

WITHOUT LYING DOWN mated that 1 million men were needed to fight, only 73,000 had enlisted after the first six weeks. The draft was instituted and the CPI went to work "disseminating information designed to sustain morale in the United States and in the Allied and neutral countries and administering voluntary press censorship."17 Thousands of speakers called "four minute men" were organized to give short talks, often in movie theaters, in 5,000 cities all over America. The Division of Syndicate Features was established and over fifty prominent writers and journalists, including Samuel Hopkins Adams, Booth Tarkington, Wallace Irwin, and Rex Beach, were given the responsibility "to make clear why we are at war and to explain the ideals for which we are fighting." There was the Division of Women's Work to encourage women to support the war in tangible ways as well as accept the fact that it was their husbands and sons who were going to do the fighting. There was even a Bureau of Cartoons "to sell the war" and weekly bulletins stressing government priorities were sent to over 750 cartoonists throughout the country. And while official newsreels were distributed to theaters and daily news bulletins were issued to the press, censorship was always carefully and calculatingly called "voluntary." The Committee on Public Information quickly became a quintessential part of this new America—a leader in world affairs, no longer isolated from the intrigues of Europe—and in the name of national unity, the government actively promoted one way of thinking and suppressed dissent as well. There were sporadic objections from a variety of quarters, but this cooperation between the government and the press was seen by many as the natural result of patriotism at a time of national crisis. And with 200 employees, a budget of $5 million, and more than 25,000 volunteers working under his auspices, George Creel, dubbed "America's Super-Publicist," had become a very powerful man.18 Frances was familiar with George Creel as a reporter, editor, and populist reformer. In Kansas City, he had helped focus attention on local corruption and in Denver he gave national coverage to the killing of mine workers. His analysis of ten states that had "given" women the vote proclaimed the benefits of women's suffrage so convincingly that it was reprinted in pamphlet form by the National Woman Suffrage Association. He endeared himself to the administration with "Wilson and the Issues" in 1916, and in "A Closeup of Douglas Fairbanks" for Everybody's Magazine, Creel created out of whole cloth a Fairbanks who had never existed before: a youth with enviable choices who intended to go to Princeton but picked Harvard instead, a grinning optimist, and a one-man band of moviemaking, facing deathdefying feats with a constant smile.19 92

CARI BEAUCHAMP Frances knew the real Fairbanks too well to have any illusions about George Creel and she arrived at his office to find a short man in his early forties, dressed in flashy clothes and clearly very full of himself. His opening comments reflected his amazement at her attractiveness and youth. He had expected a much older woman since he knew her only by reputation, from letters of recommendations, and from her resume, which emphasized her years as head of a scenario department, Mary Pickford's writer, and her experience as a reporter and artist. Creel told her she was pretty enough to be an actress like his wife, Blanche Bates, who had just made her screen debut in The Border Legion with Hobart Bosworth. His wife had come from the New York stage and he regaled Frances with stories aimed to impress her, but failed miserably.20 She tried to keep her irritation to herself until Joseph Tumulty, the president's personal secretary, joined the meeting. Although he clearly "had an eye for the ladies," Tumulty took her seriously and talked about the assignment. Still he told her he hesitated to approve her appointment because it was dangerous at the front and women of experience and substance, such as Mary Roberts Rinehart, were needed to serve in these positions. Frances informed him that she was a friend of Mary Roberts Rinehart; if Mrs. Rinehart personally recommended her, would he reconsider and sign her commission? Tumulty reappraised the young woman, made note of "the resolve behind her eyes," and concluded that she was "a rare, rare person, possessing a divine flame." He assured Frances that he would look upon her appointment favorably with such an endorsement.21 Mary Roberts Rinehart's husband was stationed as an army physician just outside Washington and Mary happened to be in town visiting him when she and Frances literally ran into each other at the White House. Mary had trained as a nurse before taking up writing and she wanted to return to France in that capacity. Even though she reached 2 million people through her articles in the Saturday Evening Post, she craved the tangible feeling of accomplishment that nursing the wounded brought and she was in the process of trying to cut through the red tape that forbade a woman with two sons serving overseas to go over herself. Rinehart was enthusiastic about Frances's being a correspondent and agreed to speak to Tumulty, whom she had come to know as the man who stood between President Wilson "and the men who would use him," respecting him as "staunch, shrewd, and loyal." She personally visited him and Creel to vouch for Frances's ability and tenacity and when her official appointment came through, Frances thanked the "generous, warm-hearted woman" profusely and went to New York to await further instructions.22 Frances's assignment was big news. There was a full-page spread in Mo