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Chapter 4

Frances 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.

“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 fiancé 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 fiancé 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.

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, but 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 Merle asked if Frances was there, Margaret replied, “I think she is out. If you will wait a moment, I’ll 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 Dressler was back on Broadway starring in Tillie’s 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 girl.⁹

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.

“I’m 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 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 fiancée, 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; 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 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 Camélias into Camille for Clara Kimball Young and joked about avoiding cliché 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

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 Alla 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 René, 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 determined. 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 Scènes de la vie de Bohème to adapt, cautioning her to stay clear of Puccini’s opera to protect him from 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 Carré 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 of Pleasure 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 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