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Chapter 5

Frances 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.” 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 Dressler 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 Tillie’s Punctured Romance or Tillie Blobbs of Tillie’s Nightmare, but if the paying audience made that mistake, so much the better.⁴

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 Carré, 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 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 non-Trust 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 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 father-daughter 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 “bête 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.

“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 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 “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 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 fiancée 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.

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 born 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 of Sunnybrook 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 ‘Little 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 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 of Sunnybrook 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 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.