Читать книгу Without Lying Down - Cari Beauchamp - Страница 14

Chapter 7

Mary Pickford was married to one man and in love with another, but she still had an eye for a handsome face. In her position as their honorary colonel, she reviewed the troops of the 143rd Field Artillery and blew a special silver whistle to start the camp football game. On the field and at the dinner at the Hotel del Coronado that February evening in 1918, Mary spotted a six-foot-two, blue-eyed, sandy-haired fullback whose chiseled features stood out even in a crowd of good-looking men. She was careful to position herself next to him for the team picture.

Mary returned to Camp Kearney with Frances a few weeks later to finalize the arrangements for the 143rd’s appearance in Johanna Enlists. The two women toured the base hospital because Mary’s “find” from the previous visit was recovering from a broken leg. Frances had to agree that Fred Thomson was something to look at and while Mary went on with her “colonel’s duties,” Frances stayed behind to talk with the handsome patient.

The lieutenant had just turned twenty-eight when Frances, almost thirty, met him at Camp Kearney and she soon realized he was no ordinary man; Frederick Clifton Thomson was the chaplain of the 143rd and a world champion athlete.¹

Frances went to church only to get married or to witness someone else doing the same and while she still rode horses occasionally, she had no interest in sports. Had she ever read the sports section, she might have recognized Fred, for he had run, hurdled, and thrown his way to the title of All Around Champion Athlete of the World at the National Amateur Athletic Union’s Field and Track Championship in Chicago in 1910. Since he was a native of Pasadena, the local papers often ran articles under his byline about the virtues of clean living.²

But as Fred and Frances spent the afternoon talking, they realized they had met their respective match. He was well read and a musician and mathematician by avocation with a breadth of knowledge she had rarely encountered—certainly never in someone so good-looking.

“No one had written more satirically about ‘love at first sight’ than I,” Frances admitted, but that night she told Mary it had happened to her. She knew that if she had penned such a scene it would have been discarded as too far-fetched, but the truth was that the experienced and sophisticated writer had fallen in love with a straitlaced, God-fearing Boy Scout.³

Behind the smiling, competent, and assured veneer, there was a complicated man who, as the third of four brothers, had been beaten by his minister father, “always in the name of God.” He had grown up aiming to please, watching and then weaving his way through the patterns of behavior that would result in peace, yet developing his own moral compass, a strong backbone, and a list of very real accomplishments.⁴

Fred Thomson’s mother, Clara, was a four-foot-eleven-inch powerhouse, the only survivor of thirteen children after her father caught tuberculosis and fatally infected all her brothers and sisters. Clara had married a medical student, James Harrison Thomson, on what turned out to be his deathbed and, a young widow overnight, she went on to Wooster College in Ohio. She earned her master’s degree by cataloging their library, then she and her mother, Anna, joined fellow Indianians in a group purchase of property in southern California.

There Clara was reunited with her dead husband’s younger brother, Williell, a brilliant, troubled man who had attended Hanover College, taught school, and studied law before graduating from Presbyterian Seminary in Danville, Kentucky. He continued his studies at the San Francisco Theological Seminary and reencountered his sister-in-law while serving as the minister at Santa Monica Presbyterian Church. They were married in December of 1882.⁵

The Thomsons built a large house on the corner of Columbia and Fair Oaks in Pasadena. Their widowed mothers lived with them, and Clara and Williell became active in the community, circulating antisaloon petitions and helping found Sierra Madre College. Clara read Greek and Latin and taught school, but her immediate focus was on what she called her “four stairsteps”: Henry Lyon Thomson, born in 1885 when Clara was thirty-five, followed by Williell junior in 1888, Frederick Clifton in January of 1890, and Samuel Harrison in 1895. Williell continued to work as a pastor, and also as a surveyor, civil engineer, teacher, and a superintendent of the Pasadena Street Railway Company. He wandered from job to job, never particularly successful at any of them, and it was Clara’s strong will that held the family together. Everything and everyone was expected to function and behave within very strict guidelines to be worthy of her attention, let alone her approval.

Entering first grade at the age of four, Fred set himself on a steady course to win approval at school and avoid punishment at home. His mother’s idea of high praise was to tell him that he was “fairly obedient and never obtrusive,” yet he flourished academically and excelled in everything athletic. Acclaimed as the star fullback of the Occidental Academy High School football team, he was accepted at Occidental College as a sixteen-year-old freshman and played all four years for the varsity team. He won event after event, local championship after local championship, and the Los Angeles Herald declared “Thomson was practically the Occidental team,” but good grades and athletic awards weren’t enough for Clara Thomson.⁶

Musical instruction at home was a daily occurrence and Fred was also active in the YMCA, played in the college band, joined the literary society, worked on the staff of the college yearbook, and served as student body president his senior year. After graduating from Occidental and a brief stint as the director of the Long Beach YMCA, Fred decided to follow his father and older brother Williell in becoming a Presbyterian minister.

It was the summer before he entered Princeton Theological Seminary that Fred was first heralded as “the All Around Champion Athlete of the World,” winning the AAU National Championship by accumulating the most points in a series of events—the 100-yard dash, the shot put, high jump, 880-yard walk, hammer throw, 120-yard hurdles, pole vault, throwing a fifty-pound weight, the one-mile run, and the broad jump.⁷

He played football for Princeton and represented the college when he defended his title as National All Around Athlete at the AAU meet of 1911, again held in Chicago. He scored a total of 6,709 points, exactly 500 more than his nearest competitor, yet after completing his second year of seminary, “the red blooded divinity scholar” announced on his return home to Los Angeles in the spring of 1912 that he would not enter the Olympics.⁸

Although he was “almost certain to make the team,” Fred was morally opposed to competitions held on Sundays and the Olympic schedule in Stockholm would have challenged those convictions. Still, he claimed the primary reason for his decision was that “I have spent two of my summers at athletics and will not give up all my time to sports again this year. While I would very much like to make the trip, I cannot see my way clear to do it. I will spend the summer practicing my profession, preaching.”⁹

Fred served as pastor at Peck Memorial Chapel in Washington, D.C., in July and August of 1912. He stayed in training during his final year of seminary and competed in various AAU National meets, beating not only his own record but those set by Jim Thorpe in the Olympics only months before, and then won the National Championships one more time when they were held at the University of Southern California in July of 1913. As the three-time champion, he formally ended his athletic career, turning all his energies to his ministry.

His father had died that spring and Williell junior, who had served as a missionary in Chile for a year, now left the ministry to teach Spanish at Occidental College. Fred replaced him as the pastor at Hope Chapel in Los Angeles, more dedicated to his calling than ever and writing a fourteen-week series of articles in the Los Angeles Evening Herald advocating training, dedication, and, as always, “clean living.”¹⁰

Fred also resumed his relationship with his college sweetheart, Gail DuBois Jepson, a pretty, soft-spoken young woman who had become a teacher after graduating from Occidental. His father had expressed concern that with a history of tuberculosis, Gail was not physically strong enough to keep up with Fred, but the couple were formally engaged on August 1, 1913, and within the next two months, he was ordained by the Presbytery of Los Angeles and they became the Reverend and Mrs. Frederick Clifton Thomson.¹¹

Gail fell into the role of preacher’s wife, playing the piano and teaching Sunday school. They were assigned to the Presbyterian Church of Goldfield, Nevada, a remote mining town on the edge of Death Valley halfway between Carson City and Las Vegas. Fred preached in the local Presbyterian and Methodist churches and his work throughout the state as Nevada’s commissioner of the Boy Scouts of America, an organization created only a few years earlier, demanded much of his time and gave him the most satisfaction.

In June of 1916 they were called home to Pasadena because Williell junior was ill and dying. He had been diagnosed the year before with leukemia, but the death of his adored older brother at twenty-seven was a shock to Fred. Gail stayed on with her family to recover from a flare-up of her tuberculosis and soon after Fred was notified it had developed into meningitis. He just missed the train that stopped at Goldfield only once a week and frantically borrowed a motorcycle to ride to Pasadena, but lost his way in the desert for a day before finally arriving almost twenty-four hours after Gail had died at home in her sleep.¹²

Fred returned to Goldfield, but within months the United States entered the war and he quickly decided to enlist. He visited his mother for a few days before heading for the Los Angeles recruiting office. He had been gone from the area for over a year, but he was still a popular personality and his picture headed a two-column article in the Los Angeles Tribune announcing “Fred Thomson to Act as U.S. Army Chaplain” and his enlistment was used to recruit other young, athletic men.¹³

Fred was commissioned as a second lieutenant and assigned to Battery F of the 143rd Field Artillery, stationed first in Arcadia and then Camp Kearney. He served as chaplain to 1,200 men and ran the Regimental Exchange, organized sporting events, conducted religious services, served as general counsel for the enlisted men, and helped in determining “whether or not the soldier is receiving just and fair treatment from the officer.” It was as the regiment’s star fullback that he broke the leg that put him in the hospital when Frances came to visit and decided to change her plans. She had agreed to write the scenario for Johanna Enlists, but after meeting Fred “I became so conscientious about my work that I decided to stay and supervise the entire production.”¹⁴

Rupert Hughes’s original story begins, “Johanna Renssler is a homely spiteful stupid lazy young girl of nineteen who lives with her pa and ma on an isolated farm. They are ashamed of her and never allow her to meet any men.” Obviously, changes had to be made for a starring vehicle for Mary Pickford, and Frances’s version introduces “Johanna, pretty little daughter of a backwoods farmer who sighs for romance for all she knows is drudgery.”¹⁵

Just as in A Girl’s Folly, the heroine “prays for a beau to be sent to her,” but this time an entire regiment arrives to encamp at the family farm. Frances has a mischievous Mary smiling serenely as she sits on the fence “reviewing the troops,” certain they are marching only so she can make her choice. After the obligatory complications and comic misadventures, Mary rides off into the sunset with her captain, played by Douglas MacLean, and the regiment in the background is the 143rd.

When his leg healed, Fred managed a brief leave and visited Frances at the studio in Los Angeles. They had known each other less than a month, but were already making plans to marry as soon as the war was over. Fred claimed not to care about her past, but insisted on following his own moral code; he would not sleep with her until after they were married.¹⁶

With Fred as added inspiration, Frances was more determined than ever to be assigned overseas. A government commission offered her the greatest opportunity to travel unimpeded, so with Mary’s and Al Cohn’s help, she headed to Washington and an appointment with George Creel, head of the Committee on Public Information [CPI], the same week Fred began his trip to France.

Neutrality had been the official American position for so long, the CPI’s challenge was to shift popular sentiment to support a state of war. Wilson’s reelection the previous November had been due in large part to keeping the country out of international conflicts and as late as January of 1917, he was advocating the possibility of a negotiated end to what was still called the European War. When increased German submarine attacks against American ships threatened the flow of trade and endangered the boost the war had brought to the American economy, the opinions of the powers that be shifted, but declaring war alone did not bring support from the population at large.

Enthusiasm for the war effort was so lackluster that although it was estimated that 1 million men were needed to fight, only 73,000 had enlisted after the first six weeks. The draft was instituted and the CPI went to work “disseminating information designed to sustain morale in the United States and in the Allied and neutral countries and administering voluntary press censorship.”¹⁷

Thousands of speakers called “four minute men” were organized to give short talks, often in movie theaters, in 5,000 cities all over America. The Division of Syndicate Features was established and over fifty prominent writers and journalists, including Samuel Hopkins Adams, Booth Tarkington, Wallace Irwin, and Rex Beach, were given the responsibility “to make clear why we are at war and to explain the ideals for which we are fighting.” There was the Division of Women’s Work to encourage women to support the war in tangible ways as well as accept the fact that it was their husbands and sons who were going to do the fighting. There was even a Bureau of Cartoons “to sell the war” and weekly bulletins stressing government priorities were sent to over 750 cartoonists throughout the country. And while official newsreels were distributed to theaters and daily news bulletins were issued to the press, censorship was always carefully and calculatingly called “voluntary.”

The Committee on Public Information quickly became a quintessential part of this new America—a leader in world affairs, no longer isolated from the intrigues of Europe—and in the name of national unity, the government actively promoted one way of thinking and suppressed dissent as well. There were sporadic objections from a variety of quarters, but this cooperation between the government and the press was seen by many as the natural result of patriotism at a time of national crisis. And with 200 employees, a budget of $5 million, and more than 25,000 volunteers working under his auspices, George Creel, dubbed “America’s Super-Publicist,” had become a very powerful man.¹⁸

Frances was familiar with George Creel as a reporter, editor, and populist reformer. In Kansas City, he had helped focus attention on local corruption and in Denver he gave national coverage to the killing of mine workers. His analysis of ten states that had “given” women the vote proclaimed the benefits of women’s suffrage so convincingly that it was reprinted in pamphlet form by the National Woman Suffrage Association. He endeared himself to the administration with “Wilson and the Issues” in 1916, and in “A Close-up of Douglas Fairbanks” for Everybody’s Magazine, Creel created out of whole cloth a Fairbanks who had never existed before: a youth with enviable choices who intended to go to Princeton but picked Harvard instead, a grinning optimist, and a one-man band of moviemaking, facing death-defying feats with a constant smile.¹⁹

Frances knew the real Fairbanks too well to have any illusions about George Creel and she arrived at his office to find a short man in his early forties, dressed in flashy clothes and clearly very full of himself. His opening comments reflected his amazement at her attractiveness and youth. He had expected a much older woman since he knew her only by reputation, from letters of recommendations, and from her résumé, which emphasized her years as head of a scenario department, Mary Pickford’s writer, and her experience as a reporter and artist.

Creel told her she was pretty enough to be an actress like his wife, Blanche Bates, who had just made her screen debut in The Border Legion with Hobart Bosworth. His wife had come from the New York stage and he regaled Frances with stories aimed to impress her, but failed miserably.²⁰

She tried to keep her irritation to herself until Joseph Tumulty, the president’s personal secretary, joined the meeting. Although he clearly “had an eye for the ladies,” Tumulty took her seriously and talked about the assignment. Still he told her he hesitated to approve her appointment because it was dangerous at the front and women of experience and substance, such as Mary Roberts Rinehart, were needed to serve in these positions.

Frances informed him that she was a friend of Mary Roberts Rinehart; if Mrs. Rinehart personally recommended her, would he reconsider and sign her commission? Tumulty reappraised the young woman, made note of “the resolve behind her eyes,” and concluded that she was “a rare, rare person, possessing a divine flame.” He assured Frances that he would look upon her appointment favorably with such an endorsement.²¹

Mary Roberts Rinehart’s husband was stationed as an army physician just outside Washington and Mary happened to be in town visiting him when she and Frances literally ran into each other at the White House. Mary had trained as a nurse before taking up writing and she wanted to return to France in that capacity. Even though she reached 2 million people through her articles in the Saturday Evening Post, she craved the tangible feeling of accomplishment that nursing the wounded brought and she was in the process of trying to cut through the red tape that forbade a woman with two sons serving overseas to go over herself.

Rinehart was enthusiastic about Frances’s being a correspondent and agreed to speak to Tumulty, whom she had come to know as the man who stood between President Wilson “and the men who would use him,” respecting him as “staunch, shrewd, and loyal.” She personally visited him and Creel to vouch for Frances’s ability and tenacity and when her official appointment came through, Frances thanked the “generous, warm-hearted woman” profusely and went to New York to await further instructions.²²

Frances’s assignment was big news. There was a full-page spread in Moving Picture World, two pages with pictures in Motion Picture Magazine, and a smattering of articles in the newspapers. Mary Pickford was “tearfully refusing to even discuss the necessity of getting another scenario writer” because “I am losing my best friend, the dearest chum I ever had.” Frances was painted as brave and spirited for being willing to serve and it was noted that she was relinquishing a $50,000-a-year salary in order to volunteer.²³

Finally, on the cold, rainy morning of September 18, 1918, Frances joined more than nine hundred men of the 543rd Engineers Service Battalion on Pier 57 at the New York Harbor to board the Rochambeau, converted into a transport vessel and destined for Bordeaux with a convoy of other ships.

Frances thought the Rochambeau looked like “an old tub” and her fears proved justified when after two days at sea, “we hit a storm and the storm hit us back.” Waves poured across the deck and the ship was slapped from side to side by the raging ocean. Everyone was told to stay belowdecks, and Frances was lying scared and alone in her tiny cabin when from down in the hold, where the nineteen “colored troops” were housed, she heard “majestic voices rising in spirituals.”²⁴

The Rochambeau had been forced so far off course that they landed on the northern coast of France at Brest instead of Bordeaux as planned. Everything about the transport was supposed to be secret, including Frances’s presence, so as she walked down the gangplank, “I was thunderstruck when I saw Fred Thomson standing there.” He had been in France only a week, but when he heard that a ship was about to dock unexpectedly in nearby Brest, he asked Colonel Fanoff, who had met Frances at Camp Kearney, for a one-day pass based on “a strange premonition” that she might be on board. Frances did not know if she or the colonel was more surprised when Fred brought her back to camp, but it reconfirmed to her that fate was indeed playing a hand in this relationship. Fred seemed so sure of her presence, and the comfort they had felt with each other in California was further entrenched.²⁵

The next day, Frances headed for Paris to report to the CPI headquarters. She was made a lieutenant in the army and given her papers, including a pass signed by General Pershing, an officer’s uniform, a steel helmet, and a regulation belt with a gas mask attached. She was assigned to work with Harry Thorpe, one of Doug Fairbanks’s former cameramen, and Wesley Ruggles, a fledgling director from Hollywood now in the Army Signal Corps. She had known them slightly in California and Wes’s brother, the comedian Charles Ruggles, was an old friend from the Bosworth studio.²⁶

Their task was to film the work of the Allied women. More than 20,000 American women served overseas during the war—10,000 as nurses in the army and navy and a few thousand under the auspices of the Red Cross, the YMCA, and the Salvation Army. Several hundred women were telephone operators with the Army Signal Corps and still others served as doctors, entertainers, canteen workers, interpreters, dentists, therapists, decoders, and in a myriad of other roles.²⁷

Most of the one thousand professional entertainers who joined the war effort were connected to either the Overseas Theater League or the YMCA and over half were women. Cobina Johnson sang opera, the artist Neysa McMein sketched the soldiers, and Eleanor Robson gave dramatic readings. Frances just missed Elsie Janis, who had left France after more than three solid months of several shows a day and was now in London, heading the cast of Hello, America. In between performances, Elsie visited the injured in English hospitals.

Even though she had been in France off and on for over two years, Elsie was unable to sign up for the usually obligatory six months of service because of intermittent stage commitments. Since she never officially enlisted, Elsie was one of the few entertainers allowed to travel in “street clothes” instead of a uniform and she picked up the nicknames “The Regular Girl” and “The Sweetheart of the A.E.F.”²⁸

Her popularity with the troops was unrivaled and she appeared before as many as 5,000 soldiers at a time, singing songs, telling her stories, and doing impersonations from the top of a shed, the caboose of a train, or whatever elevated, flat surface was available. Her astute sense of mimicry combined with several intense weeks of language lessons gave her a fluency in French with a “superb accent” that helped spread her renown to all the Allied soldiers. Almost always accompanied by her mother, Elsie Janis was credited with seeing more of the front than any officer.²⁹

When live entertainment was not available, women delivered the film and ran the projectors for the hundreds of movies that were shown to the soldiers. Frances witnessed the popularity of movies time after time; they were shown in warehouses, airplane hangars, on battered portable screens, or projected against the wall of a building in the village square where townsfolk crammed in around the soldiers. “Charlie and Doug” were the two favorites, but anything showing familiar sights from home—the Statue of Liberty, a Chicago department store, or San Francisco’s Golden Gate—created a sensation and bolstered morale. Toward the end of the war German propaganda films left behind by the retreating army became a prime attraction.³⁰

Frances traveled to and from Paris for a few days at a time, usually arriving on or near the front after a battle to witness doctors and nurses doing what they could for the injured in the shattered villages and burying the dead. She was struck by how thoroughly exhausted the Europeans were after four devastating years of war.

“The vastness, the immensity, the awfulness of what I saw as I kept moving along with the front line engagements was utterly beyond my powers of comprehension, let alone my ability to describe or scenarioize [sic]. . . . I could not write of the war, of the agonies, of the bravery of our boys or the things they endured—I simply couldn’t do it.”

Still, she continually worked on ways to shape their film into a cohesive story and whenever the truck wasn’t too bumpy or the candle still had a flame, she took her notes and occasionally turned to writing comedy vignettes “for relief from the strain.”³¹

More and more soldiers were being sent to the front, but the 143rd Field Artillery company remained in Brest. Fred’s frustration built as time and again his company was held back to train the new recruits that kept landing. He managed to visit Frances in Paris in the middle of October, but a massive air raid prevented them from enjoying the brief interlude. A Paris school was bombed during the raid and dozens of French children were killed. This reality of the war hit Frances harder than hearing the guns of the front; nothing was sacred and she was learning it firsthand.

She was preparing to leave Paris on the last day of October when Fred arrived with the news that his regiment was finally leaving for the front. She was relieved he hadn’t gone sooner and kept her worries to herself. For several years, everyone had been saying that the war couldn’t last much longer and now rumors abounded of German retreats and armistice, but still the war raged on.

The German occupation remained strong in some areas, but in the Alsace and Lorraine territories they had almost “melted away.” Her orders were to attach herself to the Signal Corps and the Red Cross units heading there to tend the wounded Allies abandoned in prison hospitals as the Germans retreated, but when she arrived at the caravan departure site, her division had gone. All the remaining trucks, ambulances, and cars were filled with doctors, nurses, and equipment. She was debating what to do next when an officer told her, “You’ll have to turn back.”

“As ‘turning back’ was not in my life’s pattern, I walked past the long line of trucks filled with supplies until I came to the only one where the seat beside the driver, a Sergeant, was unoccupied. At that moment, a bugle call signaled for the caravan to leave. Just as the driver of the truck was about to start his motor, I scrambled aboard. ‘You’re in for a tough ride,’ was all he said.”³²

It was a nightmare of a ride. Once-prosperous towns were rubble; destruction was everywhere. Bomb shells had created holes the size of craters in the roads and made them a maze to maneuver. The heavier trucks fell behind as they passed the battlefields where millions of young men had lost their lives.

Fires set by the Signal Corps to protect the convoy from rats were blazing when they finally approached Verdun. The silhouette of the half-destroyed walls of the town’s cathedral reminded her of a Doré illustration from Dante’s Inferno.

Mary’s latest letter had helped convince Frances that the end of the war was near because the studio bosses had told them to lighten up on the “Kill the Kaiser” plots and start making romantic comedies again. Still, it would be hard to turn the tide of the anti-German sentiment that had swept the country—what one journalist called “the ecstasy of hate that gripped the American people.”

Perhaps that was how some back home saw the situation, but in the ruins Frances found a small child’s shoe and she knew she would never see the world quite the same again.³³

She slept fitfully in the truck and, before dawn, the caravan was moving away from Verdun. Downed bridges mandated creative detours and the rain that had been intermittent the day before was pouring now. The roads became impossible to traverse and truck after truck pulled to the side, waiting for the weather to clear. Frances and her sergeant kept going until late in the afternoon when a pothole broke one of their axles. Too impatient to wait for help, Frances decided to start walking toward Luxembourg. After several hours darkness was descending and her initial confidence turned slowly to fear. She became acutely aware of the smell of death all around her that even a downpour of rain could not erase.

Cold and soaked through to the bone, she was wondering why she had left the truck when the lights of a motorcade flashed behind her. Frances stepped out into the middle of road, holding out her hands so they do could nothing but stop. She saw a general’s star on the windshield and as apprehensive as she had been walking alone, she found herself with a new set of fears. A deep, angry voice came from the dark interior of the car: “Good God, an American woman. Let me see her pass.”

She put her papers into the outstretched hand and a flashlight shining on her also revealed several shadowed men and the bristling eyebrows of the man who was reading her papers.

“Lieutenant Frances Marion. Where do you think you are going?”

“To Luxembourg, sir,” she replied with a salute.

“Not in this car.” But then came a small smile and resignation: “Damn fool women poking their noses into a man’s war. Get in.”

Frances was in no position to argue and it wasn’t until she squeezed into a seat in the back that she realized how totally exhausted she was. She slept off and on for the next two hours, quietly hoping her presence had been forgotten and desperately grateful for the ride.

They arrived in Luxembourg a little after ten at night and Frances immediately fell into conversation with some American soldiers. They told her that another carload of officers would be leaving for Trier within the hour and she managed to hitch a ride with them. There was talk of an advance guard moving across the Rhine and so when they parked outside the hotel where General William Mitchell, chief of the army’s air service in France, was meeting with other Allied officers, she sat up in the car the rest of the night hoping to catch his attention.

Wrapped in the spirit of adventure and a euphoric state of exhaustion, she spotted General Mitchell emerging from the hotel just before dawn. After his gruff reaction at finding her walking alone and giving her a ride, he said he was not going to be the one to stop her now and approved her accompanying his aide Major Louis Brereton into German territory.

Frances and the major drove through the small villages, where Germans stared in amazement but no one tried to stop them. As they drove at full speed through one of the larger towns, people threw rocks and clods of dirt at their car and from then on, they stayed on the back roads. Finally, a little after five the next morning, they approached Koblenz. At first the town appeared quietly menacing, but as they crossed the bridge spanning the Rhine river, a small band was playing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” bringing tears to their eyes.

Major Brereton encouraged Frances to return to Paris without delay. There were rumors of riots in other parts of Germany and the only troops immediately following them into Koblenz were a small band of military police. But Frances stayed on for several days, working with the supply troops as they arrived and the doctors and nurses who tended to the prisoners and the wounded left behind by the retreating German forces.³⁴

Frances was flown back to Paris on November 10 and the next morning, as word of the Armistice started to spread, the city slowly came alive. By afternoon the crowds made the streets impassable and honking horns, beating drums, music, and song filled the air—“Yankee Doodle Dandy,” “God Save the King,” “Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here,” and almost constantly the “Marseillaise.” There were too many women in mourning for sons and husbands to have the joy be unabashed, but the relief was palpable. Frances made the rounds as best she could and ended the evening at Maxim’s, squeezed into a table with General William Mitchell.³⁵

A few days later, Frances learned that she had been declared the first correspondent and the first American woman to cross the Rhine. Mary Roberts Rinehart had finally made it to France only two days before the end of the war, but was happily reunited with her son Stanley and stayed on for several months to cover the peace conference that was to follow.

As the war was ending, the international flu epidemic of 1918 hit. Frances was one of the hundreds of thousands struck with the virus, which killed so many people that newspaper obituaries were divided into three sections: deaths, war dead, and “epidemic casualties.” Letters from home told her that everyone was wearing masks, theaters were closed, and some studios had stopped production. Troop movements were canceled. To go outside was to risk your life. Young and old were dying of the disease after only a few days of being afflicted. Her dear New York friend, the composer Felix Arndt, who had written Nola for his wife and Marionette for Frances, was gone at the age of twenty-two. Adela Rogers St. Johns’s beloved new stepmother had died as well. No one escaped being touched in one way or another.³⁶

Frances recovered, yet for a time it looked as if Fred Thomson might be home before her. Then on December 7, the day before the first contingent of the 143rd were to board the ship for the States, he received word from the General Headquarters that he was being detached from his regiment and named the chaplain of the Bordeaux embarkation camp. He was to remain for at least six more months and be the coordinating officer for all their educational, recreational, and religious activities. Before taking effect, the assignment allowed an extended leave in Paris and he arranged to meet Frances before her departure.³⁷

As Frances sat in the crowded lobby of the Ritz Hotel waiting for Fred, boisterous Americans dominated the throngs of people almost desperate to celebrate. She watched “the hunting pack out for the kill” as two Frenchwomen moved in on a tall American army captain and a shorter young man in an Italian uniform. As the captain glanced in her direction, Frances locked eyes with Bosworth’s cinematographer George Hill. He said something quickly to his friend and came over to join her.

“I heard you were in France, but I’ve been stationed in Italy ever since I arrived in Europe,” George said as he sat down next to her. “Somebody told me you were going to marry a sky pilot. Is that true?”

He asked it with such incredulity that Frances laughed out loud as she nodded yes.

“A preacher’s wife,” George said, shaking his head in bewilderment. “I can’t quite see you in that role.”

Frances assured him he would understand when he met Fred, who should be arriving soon, and as they waited, they traded war stories mixed with news from home. His Italian friend was still entertaining the two young women and George waved to him to join them.³⁸

“You’ll get a great kick out of this chap. He’s the wildest coot in the Italian flying corps. He cracked up so many of their planes we called him the Austrian Ace.”

“Does he speak English?” Frances asked in a whisper as the young man walked toward them.

“Speak English? He’s American. His name is Walter Wanger.”

Within minutes, Walter and Frances were comparing notes on their San Francisco childhoods and determining how their families might have known each other. His father, Sigmund Feuchtwanger, had been a successful clothes manufacturer, but Walter’s mother changed the family name to Wanger after his father’s death. Walter had gone off to Dartmouth and independently produced several plays, but was becoming intrigued by the movie business and wanted to work in Hollywood after the war.³⁹

Frances was fascinated by this multifaceted charmer and, inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to anyone from San Francisco, volunteered to give him letters of introduction to Lasky and Zukor. Walter was holding her hand in thanks just as Fred Thomson walked though the door.

Introductions were made and Fred and George, both well over six feet, dwarfed Frances and Walter. The two men stayed and talked for another half hour before Fred and Frances were finally alone.

“I liked your friend Captain Hill very much, but where did you pick up that American imposter who was holding your hand when I arrived?” Frances explained the situation, but while he and George would become close friends, Fred never did have much patience for the showman Walter Wanger.

Fred and Frances spent Christmas together in Paris and with prewar guidebooks in hand, they visited Versailles, Napoleon’s tomb, and all the other tourist attractions. They welcomed in the new year of 1919 and in early February, she boarded the transport ship the Baltic and headed for New York.⁴⁰