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

WITHOUT LYING DOWN

COAUTHORED BY CARI BEAUCHAMP

Hollywood on the Riviera

WITHOUT

LYING

DOWN

Frances Marion and

the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood

CARI BEAUCHAMP

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 HOBBING

Manufactured in the United States of America

11   10   09   08   07   06

10   9   8   7   6   5   4   3

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of

ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (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.

WITHOUT

LYING

DOWN

I spent my life searching for a man to look up to without lying down.

—FRANCES MARION

Prologue

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

As 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 of Sunnybrook Farm, Pollyanna, 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.

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 Dressler 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 éminence 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 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, inmates’ 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 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.

Chapter 1

Marion 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-year-old 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

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

Len’s 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 fiancée, 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 séances 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.

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

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

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 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 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 . . .

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.

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 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 Dressler 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 Tillie’s Nightmare in March of 1911, she couldn’t believe her good fortune.²⁴

It’s the chance of a lifetime, kid, he told her. Dressler 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 Dressler 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 Dressler 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 Dressler, if I don’t get this interview, I’ll lose my job.

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 Tillie’s 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, 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 fiancée, 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.

Chapter 2

When 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 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 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 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 Dressler. 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.

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 Dressler, 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 Señora 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 Tillie’s 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 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 Dressler, 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 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