Читать книгу Without Lying Down - Cari Beauchamp - Страница 13

Chapter 6

By the summer of 1917, Douglas Fairbanks had skyrocketed to fame. It had been a year and a half since he had met Mary and while he had been immediately taken with her, she was attracted slowly as they saw each other at various functions, often in the company of their respective spouses. They shared a unique experience in their mutual stardom and Doug sought Mary’s advice about dealing with Zukor and Lasky, but it had not been until Doug’s mother died in December of 1916 that the relationship changed from friendship to intimacy.

Doug was heading east on the train when his mother passed away in New York. They had been estranged at the end and he walked numbly through the funeral, unable to express any grief or emotion. Mary sent him a sympathy note and he called and asked if they could talk. They drove through Central Park and during their conversation, he broke down and sobbed in her arms.

How much this experience with Douglas, as Mary always called him, had to do with her burst of suicidal depression a few weeks later is speculative at best, but Mary had now seen this strong man vulnerable and she was enraptured. She would soon learn he too was the product of a fatherless family with a desperation for the limelight.¹

He had been born Douglas Elton Thomas Ulman in Denver, Colorado, in 1883, the fourth and last of Ella Marsh Fairbanks Wilcox Ulman’s sons. He was her second son by her third husband, H. (for Hezekiah) Charles Ulman, the lawyer to whom she had turned while seeking a divorce from husband number two, Judge Wilcox of Georgia. Ulman left a wife and a law practice in New York to move to Denver and marry Ella, but he had traveled and drunk his way out of her life by the time Doug was five. Ella took back the last name of her first husband, John Fairbanks, who had died of tuberculosis shortly after the birth of her first son, and gave all the other boys his name as well.

Relatively dark-skinned at birth and an embarrassment to his mother, Doug learned early the joys of the attention that resulted when he recited verse, showed off his athletic abilities, or took parts in school plays. At the age of sixteen, he signed with the Frederick Warde stock company and toured the country for almost two years. In 1906, Ella joined her youngest son in New York, where he was an established actor with his name on marquees. That same year he met nineteen-year-old “plump, pretty, blonde” Beth Sully, who, as the daughter of “The Cotton King of Wall Street,” lived the lifestyle to which Doug aspired and Ella had always believed they deserved. A year later, Doug and his shy, adoring Beth were taking their honeymoon in Europe, a wedding present from her parents.²

Doug was working successfully on the New York stage when he was approached by Harry and Roy Aitken to appear on the screen. The Aitken brothers had taken the fortune they made financing The Birth of a Nation and formed the Triangle film company, uniting the popular directors D. W. Griffith, Mack Sennett, and Thomas Ince all under one roof. They combed Broadway for talent and had already signed De Wolf Hopper, Billie Burke, and Weber and Fields when they approached the lesser-known Fairbanks with an offer of $2,000 a week for ten weeks.³

He had made a dozen films since, most of them directed by John Emerson from scripts written by Anita Loos, and there was no denying his star quality. Loos and Emerson created situations that allowed him to jump and run and swing, giving vent to his natural athletic abilities and buoyant personality. In January of 1917 Doug formed his own company under the Lasky-Zukor banner and when Mary and Frances returned to California that spring, they were working at the same studio.⁴

At first, Frances was content to see Mary so happy. Frances thought Owen put Mary down to build himself up where Doug saw being with her as a verification of his own worth. He listened to Mary and valued her opinion. Owen was attractive, almost pretty, but slight in contrast to Doug’s strong physical presence. Although he was only about five foot eight, Doug radiated a charisma and sureness of his manliness that captivated Mary.⁵

As their affair blossomed, much of their energy went to keeping the romance a secret. There was, as always, the image to be maintained; they were both married to other people and Doug had a young son as well.

Although only eight at the time, Doug junior clearly remembers the first time he. met Mary. He was playing with his train set on the living room floor when his father brought Mary home to tea. His mother introduced this young woman as “America’s Sweetheart” and he wondered “how did such a little girl, only a little bit taller than I, get to be so important and go places alone?” Yet when she bent down on her knees and asked if she too could play with his trains, “Mary had made another conquest.” From that point on, Doug junior might be estranged from his father or clash with his mother, but he always viewed Mary as a friend and a “co-conspirator.”⁶

As enamored of Mary as Douglas was, he was not anxious to make any outward changes. Beth Sully Fairbanks was as much a mother and a manager for her husband as she was a wife—qualities he was not quick to discard. He thought it proper that to Beth the sun rose and set on him, but he needed even more. He “thrived only on the unbroken popularity of everyone,” says Margaret Case Harriman, daughter of the Algonquin owner, who knew Fairbanks all her life. She liked him enormously, but was clear about his limitations.

“Douglas Fairbanks was a man who never read anything. Even his method of deciding on scripts was to glance over them rapidly and then hand them to someone more fond of reading than he. . . . It was not a lack of intelligence or intellectual curiosity that prevented him, simply the fact that he couldn’t bear to sit still long enough. Father once said to me, in a bewildered kind of way, ‘I don’t know how I can be so fond of a man who has never read a book.’ ”⁷

So for those who knew Doug, it was amusing when a monthly column appeared under his byline in Photoplay in 1917, laced with self-deprecating humor and advocating “clean living.” Then he published a book entitled Laugh and Live, preaching optimism and “useful advice” such as to marry young and stay faithful.⁸

Frances found the blatant hypocrisy offensive and wondered if his insincerity extended to his relationship with Mary. But when she raised the possibility that she was being used by him, Mary was more than annoyed. “You have yours,” she retorted, “why shouldn’t I have mine?”

Close women friends knew Frances frankly enjoyed “jumping into bed with a man” she found particularly attractive and chided her for her “weakness,” but she defended herself by saying, “If you do the wrong thing at the right time you’ll have no regrets about having missed a snitch of fun.” Still, she cautioned Mary, “sin was not recognized as sin unless you were caught in the act” and with the complications of having a husband and a very public image, she was more likely to get caught. Her words brought only a frosty response from Mary and she knew she should keep her mouth shut until she was asked her opinion.⁹

Frances had to admit there were benefits to the affair: Mary was more cheerful than ever and while she had always thought of Mary as pretty, when “she was with Doug she actually looked sexy.” The situation also brought Frances in closer contact with Doug’s scenario writer, Anita Loos. Their paths had crossed in New York, but in their active participation in keeping the romance hidden, they became friends.

They used a variety of ruses, such as Mary and Frances making a public point of going horseback riding together and then as prearranged, secretly meeting Doug, who was riding with Anita. Doug and Mary went off, usually to his brother’s house nearby, and Frances and Anita rode together for an hour or two, then reunited with Doug and Mary before returning to the stables.¹⁰

Anita and Frances shared a variety of sensibilities, including their mixed emotions about Mary and Doug’s relationship and their belief in their own good fortune for being a highly paid part of this movie business. Anita too had spent her formative years in San Francisco, moving there from Shasta when she was four. Her father held a variety of jobs related to the theater and Anita took to the stage at an early age.

The family moved on to Los Angeles and then San Diego, where Anita watched the one-reelers shown between the live acts at her father’s theater and quickly ascertained a difference in their quality: the ones labeled Biograph were almost always superior. Copying the address from the film can labels, she sent off several story ideas to 11 East 14th Street in New York and to her everlasting joy and pride, back came a check for twenty-five dollars. The third one she sold, The New York Hat, was to be Mary Pickford’s last film for Griffith.¹¹

When Frank Dougherty of Biograph in New York wrote that he was coming to Los Angeles in January of 1914 and “would like to have a personal interview” with her, she was enthusiastic at the prospect. She took the two-hour train ride up the coast with her mother, but when they arrived at the makeshift studio, D. W. Griffith was in the middle of filming Judith of Bethulia and Minnie Loos was so convinced it was a den of iniquity, she returned Anita posthaste to San Diego.

Although not quite five feet tall and looking much younger, Anita was twenty-six years old and had already proven herself capable of supporting herself. Yet the times and her own attitude mandated her obedience to her mother’s rare ultimatum: “I’ll never let you go back into that studio.”¹²

Anita found comfort at the local library, where she was influenced in equal measure by Spinoza, Kant, and Voltaire and the society sections of East Coast newspapers, and she used the nearby Hotel del Coronado, already famous as a winter resort for the rich, as a laboratory for experimenting with relationships. She had a series of wealthy boyfriends, including the heir to a Detroit fortune and the son of a United States senator, but she quickly realized men bored her as soon as they proclaimed their interest in her and she realized she was a complete failure as a gold digger.

She continued to send off her scripts to Biograph but kept her paychecks secret after several of her boyfriends made it clear they were threatened by her accomplishments. While her opinion of men in general and the rich in particular went down a few more notches, she began to plot her “escape by an archaic method that belonged back in the generation of my poor helpless mother.” In retrospect, Anita said, “I separated the men from the boys and purposely chose a boy” and recalled trying to back out of “the larcenous arrangement” at the last moment, but her mother wouldn’t budge because “I’ve already ordered the cake.”¹³

When Anita retold the story in later years she claimed her marriage lasted all of one awful night in a bungalow at the del Coronado and then she ran home to her parents. In reality, her marriage to Frank Pallma, a five-foot-tall composer and musician, lasted several months. When Anita did return to her mother, however, Minnie’s attitude was primarily one of relief that her daughter had lost her virginity in a respectable way and she saw no further impediment to her working in the movies.

Griffith was now at Triangle, busy building the sets for Intolerance, but welcomed Anita as a full-time writer. She quickly found her niche writing for Doug Fairbanks, confident that she was finally where she belonged.¹⁴

Like Frances, Anita made light of her scriptwriting, saying that once the plot was developed, “it was a breeze” and she had so much fun, it was almost a crime to be paid for it. But also like Frances, Anita got up before dawn to write and agonized over the words she chose. Frances preferred dictating, in part because the secretary was an audience whose reaction she could gauge, but most often she and Anita wrote by hand on long yellow pads. Both also claimed never to learn to type, as if the skill would make their careers and success appear premeditated, but in reality they were seen using typewriters on occasion.¹⁵

Their similar outlooks extended to their sensitivity about their lack of extensive formal education, and both were prolific readers. Anita worked at being a natural wit and might have been a little more confident about her work than Frances and Frances was a little more comfortable in her own skin than Anita, but they were both uniquely disciplined workers in a Hollywood full of diversions and their friendship flourished.

Marie Dressler returned to California in the fall of 1917, forced by economic necessity to give up her farm and go to work. The newspapers reported she had formed her own company in partnership with “her manager and husband,” James Dalton, and signed with Goldwyn to make eight two-reel comedies. Frances was troubled by the turn in her friend’s career and didn’t laugh when Marie joked that in these new short films, based again on a character named Tillie, “plot would be replaced by pies.” As always, Marie protested that she had never been happier.¹⁶

Frances tended to be so loyal to her women friends that she didn’t trust the men they were with, and Jim Dalton was no exception. Despite the press accounts that he was Marie’s husband, Jim had yet to get the divorce he kept promising, but after Marie’s cold response to her warnings, Frances knew that whatever Jim turned out to be, nothing she said would make the slightest difference. All she could do was hope for the best.¹⁷

And Frances was reminded once again that she was in no position to make judgments about relationships when on August 21, 1917, she was served with papers informing her that Robert Pike was suing “Marion Owens Pike, also known as Frances Marion Pike,” for divorce on grounds of desertion. When she did not respond, Robert was granted an uncontested interlocutory decree in Superior Court in San Francisco in early November.¹⁸

That same week, Photoplay hit the stands with a four-page spread called “Frances Marion: Soldieress of Fortune.” This was the first major piece just on her in a fan magazine and the coverage marked a new plateau for her career. The article featured glamorous photographs of Frances, played up her San Francisco background, praised her writing and artistic abilities, and featured several self-deprecating quotes. It presented a composite picture of a beauty with humor, brains, and an awe-inspiring salary. No mention was made of any marriages.¹⁹

In the midst of this publicity, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm became the smash success she and Mary had hoped for and with it Mary said she “gained back the ground I had lost.”

As Frances was writing the script for Mary’s next picture, A Little Princess, a young man from the casting office called to say he was bringing over “a maiden fairer than Aphrodite” for her consideration. He walked in a few minutes later escorting a thin, awkward teenage girl with enormous eyes and Frances’s first reaction was that her fluttering hands and pinched face made her look like “a trapped little animal.” But when the man said, “beauty like this should not go unnoticed,” Frances threw him out of her office and admonished the young girl, now with tears in her eyes, to “pay no attention.”²⁰

“Tell me about yourself,” Frances said in an effort to make her comfortable. Without any evidence of self-pity, the visitor talked of her early childhood in Kansas, her father’s death when she was five, and her mother’s decision to move the family to Santa Cruz, a small beach town on the northern California coast. Her mother and her two older brothers were now running a boardinghouse in the summer and she was in Los Angeles looking to work as an extra. She had appeared in the background of the circus scene in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and was hoping for a small part in whatever Mary was doing next. She had tried the casting offices of every studio in town and while she had found a few small parts, the highlight of her experience so far was actually meeting the great Griffith himself. He had told her she looked too much like Lilian Gish to be in any of his pictures and it was the nicest thing anyone had ever said to her. Her mother had created an appellation in honor of her two maiden aunts, Eliza and Susan, and named her ZaSu Pitts.

As Frances watched and listened to the young ZaSu, she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry and it occurred to her that others might be touched the same way. There was a key part in A Little Princess for a young maid called a slavey and when Frances told Mary the full story, ZaSu was given the role.²¹

Frances’s scenario for A Little Princess was sixty pages of detailed stage directions, camera angles, and titles utilizing fantasy sequences à la Tourneur to illustrate the stories from the Arabian Nights Mary’s character Sara Crewe uses to entertain the other girls at boarding school. Premiered on November 5, 1917, A Little Princess packed the Strand theater and once again the rave reviews poured in for Mary’s “flawless” acting. Moving Picture World was not the only one to make special mention of the actress playing the young slavey; “Watch ZaSu Pitts, for she is a coming star.”²²

While having over a month to work on each scenario was a new luxury for Frances, she was on a constant lookout for script material. In the evenings she often read out loud as Mary spent the obligatory hour washing and setting her hair; always sensitive to her lack of education, Mary was comfortable having Frances read to her without fear of being condescended to or judged.²³

It was during one of their informal sessions that Frances read the novel The Star of the Sea by William Locke about two polar-opposite teenage orphans: the rich but crippled Stella Maris, “a figure of wondrous beauty,” and Unity Blake, “a victim of cruel fate, deformed, but equally beautiful of soul.” Stella lives in luxury, protected from the realities of the world by her titled aunt and uncle. Her reason for living becomes the handsome journalist John Risca, who visits her daily, and it is not until she is operated on and walks again that she learns John is “burdened by a drink-crazed wife” who is in jail for beating the orphan who worked for them, Unity Blake. Out of pity and guilt, John adopts Unity, who also comes to love John and she knows that when his wife is released, his happiness with Stella will end. Unity commits the “ultimate act of sacrifice” by killing the wife and then herself, leaving John a note explaining, “You was the only one as was ever kind to me. God bless you and Miss Stella Maris and make you happy.”²⁴

It was fairly strong, serious material and Frances was surprised when Mary announced her determination to play both roles. Closeting herself to dress in her Unity costume, Mary appeared with her hair greased down, a slumped shoulder, and little makeup and it took even Frances a minute to recognize the pathetic little figure standing in the doorway.²⁵

Adolph Zukor came to the set and “the look of dismay on the poor man’s face was something to see,” Mary said. “I had to pacify him that I died early in the picture.”

Zukor replied, “The sooner the better!”

Stella Maris brought a new pinnacle of acclaim for Mary’s dramatic talents, particularly for her role as Unity Blake. Without padding or props, Mary maintained the limp, a slumped shoulder, and a twisted mouth throughout all her scenes, and the fact that a beautiful actress willingly slicked down her hair with Vaseline to look so plain brought unprecedented praise. “Stella Maris should prove a turning point in the history of America’s favorite star,” Photoplay proclaimed. “The public will never again be satisfied with plays in which Miss Pickford is not given an opportunity to act.”²⁶

Mickey Neilan came in for his share of plaudits and the cameraman Walter Stradling was applauded for his technical achievements in the scenes where Unity and Stella share the screen. Yet Frances’s name was mentioned rarely, even when the scenario was praised for “rising far above the novel through pure artistry of development.”²⁷

Paramount put the full resources of its publicity department behind the film, and theater owners received sample postcards to send customers, suggestions for store tie-ins, and life-size cardboard cutouts of Mary. Alfred A. Cohn, who had written articles praising Mary, Doug, and Mickey for Photoplay, was hired as Mary’s personal publicist. Cohn prided himself in having friends in high places, such as President Wilson’s personal secretary Joseph Tumulty, and his contacts culminated in Paramount’s sending out pictures of President Wilson saying, “I have to thank you for the opportunity of witnessing Stella Maris, a production which I am sure will hearten the nation at this time of crisis. Its theme of woman’s lofty ideals has an irresistible appeal and its portrayal of all phases of life must be an incentive for good and loving deeds.”²⁸

Even accepting that the president of the United States would allow himself to be used in publicity for a film, how murder and suicide were considered “incentive for good and loving deeds” is beyond comprehension. Still, the promotion underscored two facts: Mary’s image was unassailable and everything, even Stella Maris, was being tied to the war, or, as it was becoming known, “this crisis.”

As American men began dying on the battlefields of Europe, attention to the war effort increased. Frances was shocked when the studio bosses expressed their enthusiasm for the war as a boon to business; people were in need of diversion and “our theaters will be packed to the rafters.” At first, they tried to balance the content of their films to keep their European markets open in spite of the war, but by late 1917 that was impossible. Support for the war had grown slowly and many of the studio chiefs were vulnerable to criticism as immigrants resisting the confrontation against their original homelands. As a result, Mary became a “super-patriot” and theaters were soon flooded with “Kill the Hun” movies. Audiences were urged to “Come and hiss the Kaiser! Everybody is doing it!” and scenarios started to lose all subtlety. With titles like To Hell with the Kaiser, The Kaiser’s Finish, and The Kaiser–The Beast of Berlin, Hollywood had a new villain.²⁹

The exception was once again D. W. Griffith, who was approached by the British government to make a film promoting the Allied cause. “Despising the pro-war propaganda,” Griffith went to England in the spring of 1917 aiming to make “a much more elevated kind of film.” The result was Hearts of the World, focusing on the effects of the war’s devastation on civilians, and it became one the most popular films of the year.³⁰

The press and the movies were the only major outreach mechanisms to the citizenry; the government knew it and the producers knew it. Studio heads had gathered in New York within a month of America’s declaration of war to organize their efforts, and William Brady, as president of the National Association of the Motion Picture Industry, was named chair of the group’s executive committee. Working hand in hand with the government, Brady said, would lead to “the advancement and widespread influence and power for the good of the screen in a common interest.” Adolph Zukor was named to head the committee on bond subscriptions and immediately pledged Famous Players Lasky to buy $100,000 worth of bonds. Who could question the patriotism or the purity of an industry so behind its government in time of crisis?³¹

While actors were privately assured by their studios that they would receive deferments, the pressure was felt just the same. Paramount’s heartthrob Wallace Reid received his deferment because he had a six-week-old son, but Doug Fairbanks’s stardom was based in large part on his heroics—how could he excuse himself from serving?

He consulted Mary and became actively and very publicly involved in the war effort. He bought $100,000 of bonds himself and after completing Reaching for the Moon, he gave his staff a vacation while he took off with his wife and son on a coast-to-coast train trip to sell bonds. He spent two days in New York making dozens of appearances and by the time the train returned to Los Angeles, it was reported that he was personally responsible for selling over a million dollars’ worth of liberty bonds. The government announced that Fairbanks was more effective serving at home than abroad and no one could doubt his patriotism.³²

Mary “adopted” an entire battalion of six hundred soldiers from the California Field Artillery. She announced that she intended “to see to it that the boys receive plenty of tobacco and candy” and when the men went overseas, they were each given a locket “containing a picture of their petite protector.”³³

Charles Chaplin was an English citizen, but it was reported that he was “unable to serve” because he was “under sized” with a twenty-six-inch chest. Instead, he joined Doug in his bond selling and other charity events and Mary was the referee when Fairbanks and Chaplin staged a burlesque fistfight in Los Angeles to benefit London’s French American Hospital. When the three highest-paid and most popular film stars appeared together, records were set for bond sales.³⁴

For a while, it worked well for everyone; the stars got the publicity, the government raised unheard-of sums of money, and the movie industry looked like the most patriotic business in the country.

Marie Dressler was another popular attraction at the bond rallies, alone or appearing with “The Big Three.” When Frances accompanied them, she was troubled to see Doug snub Marie, “acting as if she was a has-been” and unworthy of sharing the same platform with them. His snobbishness seemed almost innate and he was heard referring to his fans as “boll weevils.” Frances knew that Mary was very much in love with Doug and worried that their joint public appearances would spur the growing rumors about their relationship.³⁵

Charlotte Pickford agreed with Frances and had not wanted Mary to go on a bond-selling tour at all. First, she was afraid of the crowds, remembering their brush with disaster at the opening of The Poor Little Rich Girl. And she did not think Mary’s image needed polishing. “Our Mary’s” picture was everywhere and her films were making a fortune.

Charlotte went along as chaperon on the bond tours, but when Mary told Owen she was going, he viciously accused her of caring only for herself: “You don’t fool me, Mary, with your patriotic palaver; it’s only a clever publicity stunt to attract more attention to yourself.” Frances believed that Mary truly “felt it was her duty to serve,” and listening to Owen’s sneering remarks, she knew she was witnessing “the last tendril of feeling that Mary had for the man she had married in her teens.”³⁶

There were other effects of the war beyond Charlotte’s control. When Jack Pickford was drafted as a citizen of Canada, he immediately joined the United States Navy, where he was “assigned to the intelligence division and given the task of censoring films for export.” Before he left for Washington, Jack announced his plans to marry his latest good-time girl and the newest Triangle star, the beautiful Olive Thomas.³⁷

Olive had come to New York with a girlfriend on vacation in 1913 and found it so much fun she couldn’t stay away. Still in her teens, she left a husband and a three-dollars-a-week job at a Pittsburgh department store to try her luck modeling. She quickly rose to fame as a Ziegfeld girl and with her long brown curls and a flashing smile, the artist Harrison Fisher dubbed her “the most beautiful girl in America.” Overnight, Olive Thomas could name her price, and Triangle made the best offer.³⁸

Olive and Jack were two of a kind; he had reportedly started collecting lovers at the age of fifteen when he was taken in by the Ziegfeld beauty Lillian Lorraine. Olive’s experiences included her boss Flo Ziegfeld and she had accumulated a substantial jewelry collection as mementos.³⁹

Charlotte and Mary were not at all enthusiastic about Jack’s plans for marriage. His mother said, “You’re too young to be married,” and Mary added, “Please wait until you have built up your career.” As talented as some friends genuinely believed he was, his career was hindered by the Pickford name and his utter lack of discipline. Jack just wanted to have fun and sister Lottie was all for it. “Go ahead,” she said, the only familial voice to encourage the wedding. “Love is all we can expect out of life,” and Jack went off to Washington a married man.⁴⁰

Poor eyesight prevented Mickey Neilan from enlisting in the aviation corps, but after M’Liss was completed in the spring of 1918, he decided to return to New York to direct George M. Cohan. The five films he had made with Frances and Mary constituted one of the longest professional relationships in his career and marked a level of success that was never to be seen again.⁴¹

There were changes in Doug’s film unit as well. His chief cameraman, Victor Fleming, was drafted and in October, Fairbanks announced that Ruth Allen, a writer who had been working with him for several months, was being promoted to head the scenario department, which included Anita Loos. Mary’s old director Allan Dwan was to alternate with John Emerson in directing and shortly thereafter Emerson and Loos left Fairbanks’s company to produce their own Paramount productions.⁴²

Emerson had cultivated the press and he and Anita were played up as the brains behind Fairbanks’s success. Emerson believed in hiring his own publicity agents, fairly uncommon for directors at that time, and while Anita claimed to be “appalled,” she willingly posed for pictures. A six-part series ran in Photoplay under their byline and Doug tired of seeing himself billed with Emerson and Loos as equals in a “a triple alliance.”

John Emerson complained of throat problems in the first of many physical ailments that flared up whenever situations were not to his liking. Anita, in love with the seemingly indifferent director fifteen years her senior, went with him to New York to see medical specialists.⁴³

With everyone else on the move, Frances filled in writing He Comes Up Smiling for Fairbanks and The Goat for Donald Crisp, and when her friend Sessue Hayakawa formed his own company, she wrote him a melodrama, The Temple of Dusk. She finished adapting Captain Kidd, Jr. for Mary and saw her through the transition to a new director. William Desmond Taylor had started in the business as an actor with Thomas Ince, and then moved to directing, first with Balboa and then American in Santa Barbara, where he had worked with both Lottie and Jack Pickford. Taylor was never to be the close friend Mickey was, but he was experienced, had worked with the family, and was welcomed accordingly.⁴⁴

But for Frances, the joy and the challenge of being on the set each day with Mary and Mickey were gone. Her frustration over her own lack of participation in the war effort was building and she wondered how she could criticize the bosses’ attitude if she wasn’t actively involved herself.

Elsie Janis wrote from France, where she was entertaining the troops, and urged her to “get out of that artificial Hollywood atmosphere into life that is real, ghastly, forbidding, terrifying and magnificent,” and Frances’s desire to go overseas was cemented by reading Mary Roberts Rinehart’s latest novel, The Amazing Interlude. The story of a young American woman volunteer in a Belgian soup kitchen moved Frances to investigate the possibility of working with the Salvation Army in France. She even made contact with her old employer the San Francisco Examiner, suggesting that as a correspondent she could cover the activities of the women in the war and performers entertaining the troops.⁴⁵

She talked to Mary about her new ambitions and Mary offered to help while asking for a favor. The government was encouraging movies that would inspire enlistments and she proposed filming Rupert Hughes’s short story “The Mobilization of Johanna.” If Frances stayed just long enough to write it, she would ask Al Cohn to use his Washington contacts to get her an appointment as an official government war correspondent.

Frances never could say no to Mary.