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Chapter 8

Frances was greeted at the dock by reporters eager to hear her war stories. The reception had been arranged by Pete Smith, the Famous Players Lasky publicity man she had known when he was promoting Bosworth films. Frances used the opportunity to champion the talents of Wesley Ruggles and Harry Thorpe yet found it difficult to articulate the war’s devastation.

“What may come as an aftermath of all I saw and experienced is more than I can say right now, but when I think of all the scenes I witnessed, I realize how helpless I am, or would be, in attempting to include any of it in a scenario.”¹

She was anxious to put the war behind her, catching up with old friends like Anita Loos and meeting new ones like the Vanity Fair drama critic Dorothy Parker. She also ran into Elda Furry, or Hedda Hopper, as she was now calling herself, and they laughed about their hostile meeting years before during the filming of The Battle of Hearts. Several friends including Elsie Janis had told them both separately how much they would enjoy each other and they soon admitted their friends knew better than they did.

Hedda was a natural storyteller and she laughed as easily at herself as she did at others. She amused Frances with tales of her Quaker girlhood outside Altoona, Pennsylvania, and her marriage to the much older Broadway star De Wolf Hopper. She was “Wolfie’s” fifth wife and he kept calling her by their names: Ella, Ida, Edna, or Nella. The artist Neysa McMein suggested she see her numerologist, and by combining dates and numbers, the seer arrived at the name Hedda. Wolfie was less than enthusiastic, but he never called her by the wrong name again.²

Hedda was thirty-four, the mother of a four-year-old son, and was already starting to drop several years from her age. Frances could be cynical while Hedda crossed the line into judgmental, but they laughed without inhibition and Frances enjoyed Hedda’s rapier wit and even tolerated her constant flow of unsolicited advice. She had found a new friend who made her, even at her most honest, sound demure.³

After three weeks of vacationing in New York, Frances took the train west, stopping in Chicago to interview the heads of the several war relief organizations for her film. American Women in the War was soon released to exhibitors as a serial in fifteen reels.⁴

Frances’s first order of business after checking into the Hollywood Hotel was to see Mary. They had written often, but six months was a long time between face-to-face conversations, especially for best friends used to seeing each other every day.

Mary’s affair with Doug Fairbanks had intensified and rumors were rampant. While they were still trying to keep their relationship a secret, Owen Moore knew exactly what was happening. Already resentful of what he saw as Doug’s “instant stardom,” Owen’s drinking and mood swings escalated to the point that he threatened to kill both Mary and “that climbing monkey.” Fairbanks cavalierly told his director Allan Dwan, “Your friend Owen Moore says he’s going to shoot me, if he’s sober enough to point the gun,” but he took the threat seriously enough to go to Arizona for a month to make A Modem Musketeer and even looked into the possibility of going to South America to make a film or two.⁵

While he knew his own marriage was a sham, Doug so hated confrontations that he kept the telegraph wires busy with cables to Beth professing his love and denying any problems. She had remained blind to the affair; Doug’s busy schedule and her preference for New York over California made her fairly easy to manipulate, yet slowly her suspicions grew. During one of her California visits, Doug took off with Mary, thinking Beth was lunching with Hedda Hopper. Their friendship had developed when both their husbands were on Broadway and Beth had helped Hedda find a house when the Hoppers arrived in Hollywood. The two women often took walks together and this afternoon they wandered past Doug’s brother’s bungalow. The puritanical Hedda had seen Mary and Doug sneak into the house for assignations before and while she would never approve of such affairs, she wasn’t going to be the one to tell Beth. To avoid any possible encounters, Hedda told her the canyon was infested with rattlesnakes and rerouted their walks from then on.⁶

Doug feared facing the public scrutiny that would result from a divorce, but in his growing irritation at not having everything the way he wanted it, he rhetorically asked friends, “Why shouldn’t I divorce? Caesar did it. Napoleon did it.”⁷

Even Beth was already seeing someone else, an old friend from her debutante days, the Pittsburgh stockbroker James Evans. And when she finally went public and announced her separation from Fairbanks, Beth told some reporters that she suspected Mary Pickford as “the other woman.” Yet while the divorce was covered avidly by the press, Mary’s name was never printed and when asked, she emphatically claimed her relationship with “Mr. Fairbanks” was a purely professional one.

Mary had sent Frances the newspaper clipping when Beth was granted an interlocutory decree of divorce in November of 1918. The process itself was relatively civilized, with Doug agreeing to a one-time settlement of all his savings. His brother John took the train across the country to deliver a suitcase with half a million dollars in cash and securities to Beth and she in turn named “an unknown woman” as the cause of the divorce.⁸

Beth Fairbanks made the next move by marrying Jim Evans just as Mary entered into a very public professional relationship with Doug, Charlie Chaplin, and D. W. Griffith when they formed their own production company.⁹

The liberty bond tours had given Doug, Mary, and Charlie the opportunity to ask each other the obvious question: Why were they splitting profits with their producers? After all, people came to the movies to see them, not Zukor or Lasky. Yet their complaints and dreams might have remained just that if the trades had not reported in January of 1919 rumors of a merger between the two major distributors, Paramount and First National. Mary had thrived on playing one studio off against another to increase her income with each new contract and if such a merger occurred, she knew it would “clamp the lid on the salaries.”¹⁰

Chaplin always claimed that their initial public meetings and the press conference he held with Mary, Doug, and D. W. Griffith was as much a bluff to prevent the merger as anything, but the idea took on a life of its own and in the spring of 1919, they were formally signing the papers of their new corporation.

They called themselves United Artists, but the trades called it a “rebellion against established producing and distributing arrangements.” The four insisted their actions were “for the protection of their interests,” William McAdoo, the former secretary of the Treasury whom Doug had befriended on the bond tours, was named their general counsel, adding an air of prestige from outside the industry. McAdoo knew little about making pictures, but in these heady times, Doug, Mary, Charlie, and the Master himself represented the most successful and experienced combine imaginable.¹¹

Busy with meetings and publicity, Mary still made time to shift her attention to Frances when she suffered a relapse of the flu and sent her doctor to the Hollywood Hotel to supervise Frances’s recovery. Flowers, bed jackets, and visitors arrived by the dozens and soon she was sufficiently recuperated to head north to San Francisco. She spent several days visiting her family and the Examiner covered her visit with a page one story, headlining her as “a war heroine.”¹²

Frances’s contract with Famous Players had been in abeyance while she was overseas, and because Mary was no longer at the studio, Frances could have challenged the arrangement. Yet if there was any question that they expected her to return, it was answered by the presence of their publicity man at the pier upon her arrival in New York. Not knowing when Fred would be home, Frances was comfortable working on a film-by-film basis and she wrote a scenario for Billie Burke and adapted four Anne of Green Gables books into one script for Mary Miles Minter, the new star Famous Players hoped would challenge the departing Mary Pickford.¹³

Mary asked Frances to write for her once United Artists started producing, but that was still at least six months in the future. Fred’s letters told her he was helping organize the Interallied Games in Paris over the summer and he would not be home until September at the earliest. While he was frustrated with the delay, the games were second in importance only to the Olympics and brought together athletes of the Allied countries already holding records and developed new competitors in every field. Fred wasn’t yet sure if he would compete, but he was working with a group of boxers and was particularly impressed with the winner of the light heavyweight championship of the American Expeditionary Force, “a young Irish boy named Gene Tunney.”

Frances was wondering what to do next while she waited for Mary when a telegram arrived: “Would you consider contract as writer and director at Cosmopolitan Studio, New York? Salary two thousand dollars a week. W. R. Hearst.”¹⁴

William Randolph Hearst. The publishing baron and owner of the San Francisco Examiner who had paid her fifteen dollars a week less than ten years before was now offering her $100,000 a year. There wasn’t much to think about. Yet just the same, she checked in with Adela Rogers, who had been working for Hearst as a reporter for over five years.

Adela adored Hearst and had nothing but praise for the man. She had been living a rather conflicted life since marrying the Los Angeles Examiner’s handsome young copy editor Ike St. Johns. She had resisted changing her last name, but her beloved father insisted upon it, “so not to belittle Ike’s feelings.” She compromised and used Rogers St. Johns, and joked she had married at the age of eighteen for fear of “being an old maid.”

She was juggling her roles of being a wife to Ike and taking care of Elaine and Bill, the two young children she had wanted so badly, but Adela came alive when she was reporting, especially covering murder trials. Her husband might complain, but Hearst had backed her at every turn and she was proud to have earned his respect.¹⁵

The only person Frances cared about who was negative about Hearst was her father. He was convinced “that Hearst alone was responsible for the sinking of the Maine, war with Mexico, our troops going to France, and the rising power of the unions.” Len Owens told Frances she was “going from bad to Hearst,” but his daughter was not about to be deterred. She understood working for Hearst meant writing for Marion Davies and she was intrigued by the prospect.¹⁶

Frances had first met Marion when she was one of the four beautiful chorus girls backing Elsie Janis during the short run of Miss Information in the fall of 1915. Marion was a stunning blue-eyed blonde, unpretentious and very funny. For all her flirting, Elsie was never jealous of pretty young women and she promoted Marion as “one of the most popular gals in town judging from the coffin-like boxes of flowers that crowded the stage entrance nightly.” Marion’s bubbling personality, her genuine interest in other people, and her ability to make everyone feel good about themselves made her well liked by other chorus girls as well as the wealthy, bored, and usually married men of New York.¹⁷

That was before Marion had “settled down” with William Randolph Hearst. She had literally watched from behind the curtains as her three older sisters became showgirls, each taking the last name of Davies for the stage. “Mama Rose” ruled the roost, supported by a combination of relatives, her daughter’s salaries, their boyfriends, and later their husbands. According to Anita Loos, her mother and sisters schooled Marion in the “Gigi tradition” of pleasing a man, for catching the eye of a producer or a rich “patron” was one of the few avenues to financial security available to girls from families like the Dourases.¹⁸

Marion was eighteen and Hearst over fifty when they became an established couple in 1916. The newspaper publisher’s anti-English and pro-German stance made him unpopular with many, but Marion never cared for politics or world affairs. He gave her a Tiffany watch after their first dinner together, the start of a stream of gift giving that would last for over thirty years.

W.R.—“the Chief”—was born and raised in San Francisco, the only child of Phoebe and George Hearst. His father made his first fortune in the silver from the Comstock Lode and invested in real estate and newspapers and eventually was elected United States senator from California. Concentrating on the Harvard Lampoon and the Hasty Pudding Club instead of his studies, W.R. left college during his junior year and made his first foray into publishing at his father’s San Francisco Examiner. He expanded the family fortune by buying papers in twenty cities including New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles and purchasing a magazine combine consisting of Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, and Popular Mechanics.

Hearst served as a congressman from New York in the early 1900s, and ran unsuccessfully for mayor, governor, and twice for the presidency. By the time he met Marion, he had been married for more than ten years to another former showgirl, Millicent Willson, and was the father of five boys. The previously fun-loving Millicent showed an immediate affinity for the approval of society as soon as she married and W.R. was once again looking for diversion. Marion was hardly his first affair, but it became a serious one very quickly. He “favored fidelity in the abstract” according to his biographer W. A. Swanberg, and had “an enormous zest for life” and “an almost pagan worship of youth, energy, activity, sensation.”¹⁹

He expanded his empire to include movies in 1913 by producing newsreels and formed Cosmopolitan pictures as a showcase for what he was convinced were the great dramatic talents of Marion Davies. Anita Loos wrote Getting Mary Married for Marion, but when she and Emerson signed to work for the Talmadge sisters, she recommended Frances and W.R. embraced the idea.²⁰

John Emerson, Anita, and Frances left Los Angeles together and when they arrived in New York, Frances called Hearst’s office for instructions. She was told she was expected at the Beaux Arts apartment building, where Marion Davies opened the door amid howls of laughter and blaring music. There in the center of half a dozen Ziegfeld beauties towered William Randolph Hearst, over a foot taller and thirty years older than any of the other giggling and dancing participants.²¹

“Hi, Fran-Frances,” said Marion. “Come in, we’re just tea-teaching W.R. how to shim-shimmy!”

Out of breath but not at all embarrassed, Hearst ceased shaking his shoulders and welcomed Frances. His large size and thin voice struck her as contradictory, yet he seemed totally at ease. He looked at her with his piercing blue eyes and told her he considered her the brains behind Mary Pickford’s success and he expected the same stardom for Marion. Frances praised Marion’s talents and personality, but cautioned him that Mary’s position was unique and expressed reluctance to write for Marion.

“Don’t you like her?” Hearst asked.

“Very much,” Frances assured him. “That’s why I don’t want to do anything which could jeopardize her career.”

“I don’t understand you! I’m willing to spend a million on each picture.”

“Lavishness doesn’t guarantee a good picture, Mr. Hearst. Marion is a natural-born comedienne and she is being smothered under pretentious stories and such exaggerated backgrounds that you can’t see the diamond for the setting.”²²

Hearst was not used to direct criticism, but Frances had made her point and their mutual respect was sealed. They established that Frances would be given the freedom to finish her other commitments and be “loaned out” to make a United Artists film with Mary when the time came. All this and two thousand a week were worth a few concessions.

They found a story they could both agree on in The Cinema Murders, a light drama that had been serialized in Hearst’s Cosmopolitan magazine. It allowed for plenty of the theatrical costumes so important to Hearst, but Frances wrote in dancing scenes and comic interludes to show off what she considered Marion’s strengths. Their compromise marked the beginning of a fifteen-year tug-of-war over what was best for Marion.

Frances could write anywhere and Anita suggested sharing a house out on Long Island, since they were both making enough money to indulge in a “country home” for the season. They fell in love with the idea of a huge yard and growing their own vegetables. They hired experts, brought in soil, and dug with their own hands, but their visions of an enormous harvest to be shared with all their city friends began to wane with an infestation of bugs and then the spread of mildew. One night as they were preparing to actually eat the little home-grown bounty that had survived, Norma Talmadge called to invite them to dinner, but Anita declined. “Tonight Frances and I are eating four hundred dollars’ worth of peas.”²³

They made the most of the weekend parties along the Gold Coast that F. Scott Fitzgerald would soon immortalize in The Great Gatsby. The misery of the war seemed far away and Frances noticed how few in their circle of friends and acquaintances seemed to have been touched by it or any problems that affected the real world. Prohibition had arrived, but like Attorney General “Palmer’s raids” and talk of unions, it was a minor unpleasantry to be worked around or, better yet, ignored.

As soon as a new speakeasy opened, the passwords were known to all who mattered and the only inconvenience seemed to be that they were now drinking out of teacups instead of glasses.

Serious drinkers arrived at serious solutions. Anita claimed that Charlotte Pickford simply bought an entire liquor store, secreted the inventory in her basement, and padlocked it to keep others in general and son Jack in particular away from her stash. Out on Long Island, delivery trucks arrived with kegs marked “Pickles” and soon whiskey, rum, or champagne would magically be served.²⁴

Anita and Frances were both disciplined writers and they lived together easily, but one of the reasons Anita had pressed Frances into sharing the house was so she would have “a chaperon” for the constant presence of John Emerson. The tiny Anita was always a sucker for a tall man and his claim that he “never had been, nor ever could be, faithful to any one female” made him all the more irresistible. She convinced herself she was “different from all his other girls” and that behind his stoic presence was a great mind.²⁵

Frances did not even pretend to understand the relationship. She thought Anita was a talented “dynamo,” smart and fun to be with, and found John a total dullard with a “constipated brain” who manipulated Anita. Yet Frances was learning to withhold her opinions and she was matron of honor when Anita married John Emerson on Sunday, June 15, 1919, in a garden ceremony at Joe Schenck and Norma Talmadge’s estate. Anita beamed in her long white lace dress, a large hat, and a huge bouquet, all serving to accentuate her tiny stature next to her beloved Emerson, dressed in white flannel pants, a dark blazer, and a jaunty straw hat.²⁶

John and Anita left on a European honeymoon, a wedding gift from Joe Schenck, and Frances happily moved back to the Algonquin. With Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, and Robert Sherwood all working at Vanity Fair only a few doors away, they and their friends who regularly gathered at the hotel at noon were beginning to be called the Round Table. The name was acquired because other diners would point out Mrs. Fiske sitting next to Alexander Woolcott or H. L. Mencken next to George Kaufman and Ruth Hale “at the round table” in the center of the room. It was a casual group at first, but they were united in their seriousness about themselves and their writing.

While Frances and Dorothy Parker enjoyed each other privately, Frances was rarely at the hotel at lunchtime, and even when she was, she hesitated to join the group even for a brief visit. Her writing was of the “sentimental” type they disdained and Frances found their “verbal fencing” more exhausting than exhilarating.²⁷

She was the first to agree that her stories were not up to their literary standards, but the money she was earning was staggering. The $2,000 a week she was receiving from Hearst was augmented by the Palmer Plan of Photoplay Writing when they paid her to endorse their correspondence school. A glamourous picture of Frances was featured in their ads and she was proclaimed the “highest salaried photoplaywright in the industry.”

Frances joined Frank and Bertha Case and other friends of Elsie Janis on May 31 when the Rotterdam brought “Ma” and her daughter home from England to a reception appropriate for a conquering hero. The band played Over There and a huge banner reading “Welcome Home, Elsie Janis” covered the entire side of the tugboat that greeted the ship.

Elsie spent a month being feted and honored throughout New York and was approached by several studios. Her popularity with the troops and the press coverage of her travels gave her a natural drawing power for the screen and she signed a four-picture, $5,000-a-week contract with Lewis Selznick’s elder son, Myron.²⁸

Forming Selznick Picture Corporation was Myron’s way of celebrating his twenty-first birthday as well as getting back at the men he felt had betrayed his father. The senior Selznick had lost a power struggle with Adolph Zukor and been forced out of Select Pictures the year before. Myron had apprenticed with his father and then served as the studio manager for Norma Talmadge; by the time he signed Elsie Janis, he already had Olive Thomas and several other stars under exclusive contracts and was determined to put the name of Selznick back in lights.²⁹

Frances quietly supported the young Selznick and respected him for his intense desire to succeed. At the World studios, she had watched Myron work in the film examining room starting at seven in the morning making five dollars a week and move on to other departments, learning every aspect of the business the hard way. And she sympathized with his father, whom she saw as another “victim of overconfidence or treachery.”³⁰

Frances wrote The Flapper for Olive Thomas and continued to comb the theaters of New York for plays that would be appropriate for Marion Davies to film. With over seventy legitimate theaters, Frances saw a variety of possibilities, but Hearst preferred her to peruse the stories he had already purchased for Cosmopolitan magazine.

She agreed to write Everybody’s Sweetheart for Elsie’s first film for Selznick, but the name was soon changed to A Regular Girl to capitalize on Elsie’s well-known nickname. Frances brought in a new friend, Eddie Goulding, to help write the story, and she shared the screen credit with him. She had met the Englishman through Anita Loos and they both adored the witty young man who had acted and written for the British stage before serving in the war. When Goulding arrived in New York anxious to work in American films, Frances knew Elsie wouldn’t mind if she used A Regular Girl to give him his first break.³¹

Once the Armistice had been declared, “Kill the Hun” movies were dead at the box office. In fact, almost anything having to do with war was an anathema. When Frances adapted the play Billeted for Billie Burke, it was immediately retitled The Misleading Widow and the publicity was careful to spell out that the “farce comedy, contrary to what might be expected from the title of the original play, is about as far removed from war as can be imagined.”

The studio heads were convinced that romance and laughter were all audiences were interested in. New villains were appearing in shades of red and anti-Bolshevik themes became the rage, but it was films like Don’t Change Your Wife, Choosing a Wife, and Getting Mary Married that were packing the theaters.³²

Elsie and Frances shared the frustration that the very real problems confronted by soldiers returning home were not being dealt with or even discussed. Anita Loos and John Emerson’s last Famous Players Lasky film Oh You Women was a satire about men back from war to find women in their jobs and the ads featured one petite woman and another grossly fat one, both dressed as men in suits, complete with false mustaches, giving the eye to a sheepish-looking soldier in uniform. The studio promoted the fact that there was a purpose behind the comedy: “It drives home the point that while it was all very fine indeed for a woman to take a man’s place while he went to war, it is all wrong to consider keeping it when he comes home.”³³

Frances and Elsie tried to deliver their message in a story about a girl from high society who is inspired by patriotism to serve as a nurse overseas. When she returns home, she realizes her former life is meaningless and secretly goes to work in a boardinghouse helping former servicemen find jobs. Her employment bureau for “the boys” is a huge success; she is fulfilled as she never was in the social world and reunites with her old boyfriend with the understanding that she will continue her mission.

They used as many ex-servicemen in the cast as possible and the filming often turned into a party. The director James Young would find Elsie singing with the soldiers or down on her knees in a crap game, but she and Frances took seriously their attempt to remind people in a comedic way that soldiers had a transition to go through. Their memories of what they had seen in France filled the film with realistic details and “between us,” Elsie said, “we put everything in the picture but the delousing station.”

Elsie never considered herself a film actress. She thought she was “too fast” for the camera, looking and acting “like a Semitic jumping jack” on the screen, but making movies was fun, the money was better than she could earn anywhere else, and besides, an Equity strike had closed down the Broadway theaters.³⁴

Anita and John Emerson returned from their European honeymoon and he became deeply involved in the fight to unionize Broadway actors. Anita, however, was not very enamored of the theater and preferred, when she wasn’t churning out another film for Constance Talmadge, to dine with new friends like George Jean Nathan or H. L. Mencken. Mencken was a dedicated bachelor living in Baltimore who came to New York for a day or two at a time and Anita adored him. He was to become yet another in what would be a string of love affairs of the mind, jousting with one-liners and all-night philosophical discussions, but they were rarely the intimate liaisons Anita might have hoped for. Mencken’s intellect and wit represented what she had hoped to find in Emerson, but once she had “landed” the formerly unattainable man as a husband, it became amazingly clear how little they really had in common.

Anita and Frances genuinely enjoyed the company of smart, entertaining, and accomplished women who did not take themselves too seriously. Anita particularly relished spending the evening with Marion Davies, Justine Johnston, and the Talmadge sisters when they were away from their men, free to talk without the need to impress or adore. Frances occasionally joined the regular Tuesday night group in what they called their “cat nights,” usually gathering at the apartment at the Beaux Arts building Hearst kept for Marion.³⁵

United Artists was finally a reality and while Doug had already brought out a picture, Mary Pickford was just completing her contract with First National. Experienced as Mary was, she wanted her best friend at her side for her first United Artists film and Frances made immediate arrangements with Hearst to be “loaned.” To further ensure success, she and Mary chose a well-known story about a young orphan girl: Pollyanna.³⁶

Frances and Mary didn’t realize until they were too far along that they had been spoiled by stories with some depth and challenges, such as Stella Maris. They had reverted to a formula that was almost a caricature of Mary’s previous “little girl” films and found the syrupy sweet Pollyanna frankly insidious; “I hated writing it and Mary hated playing it.”

With the nickname of “The Glad Girl,” Pollyanna dedicates herself to finding something good in everyone and everything. Frances admitted that “in spite of our indifference” she managed to “edge in some amusing scenes” and her titles at times verge on hilarious. When confronted with her mean Aunt Polly, Mary seems at a loss for a positive retort, but then brightly comes up with “I’m glad . . . she’s not twins.” Still, they took few risks and were more relieved than satisfied when filming was completed.³⁷

In October of 1919, Frances finally received word that after organizing the Allied Games and setting a world record for the grenade throw, Fred was coming home. Mary told her to leave for New York immediately and she and Charlotte would follow as soon as the negatives were developed. Frances arrived only a few days before Fred’s ship docked, but her excitement was now tinged with doubts.

It had been eight long months since they had seen each other and they had known each other only a little more than a year. During that absence, it had been Mary’s turn to advise against a relationship: “Fred would have to give up the work which had meant so much to him; in some ways the tenets of the Presbyterian church were as rigid as the Catholic church and it would destroy a preacher’s strong position to marry a divorced woman. What would Fred’s future be? Could she give up her career? Many professional women had made these promises while in love, but if a career is in their blood, they rarely settled down for long.”

This time their heart-to-heart discussions brought Mary and Frances “even closer” and in a temporary burst of puritanical resolve, they both decided “we must renounce our loves.” Mary’s determination evaporated the next time she saw Doug, but Frances now “bitterly regretted my two marital indiscretions.” She also harbored the concern that her success might intimidate Fred.³⁸

After a joyous reunion, she confronted Fred with all her fears, but he was adamant. Yes, he had loved preaching and had thought that was what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. Yet now, particularly after the war, he saw other ways to use his talent and experience. He could teach college or write a book on athletic training. Somehow, he could combine his skill in athletics with his desire to educate. She shouldn’t worry about him. He was the lucky one. Before and after his brief marriage he’d had beautiful women fawn over him, but Frances was an equal, both intellectually and in terms of accomplishments, and unlike any other woman he had ever known.

Frances would joke that she married Fred because “she couldn’t get him any other way,” but he had showed her a strength of character and a refusal to be cajoled by her that she had never confronted before. They both felt the excitement and potential of being two strong people together.³⁹

She knew how important it was to Fred to be married in a church and she found one that would not only marry them, but meet their esthetic and ethical requirements as well. The Romanesque Judson Memorial Church at Washington Square, designed by Stanford White, had been founded by Edward Judson to do “aggressive missionary work” in Greenwich Village, providing a gymnasium, a library, and a children’s home in a “crazy quilt” neighborhood.⁴⁰

She had thought it was ludicrous when Lois Weber took several years off her age when signing that first movie contract, but now Frances officially lopped two years from her birth date on the marriage license. She wrote in November 18, 1890, making herself six months younger than Fred instead of the year and half older that she really was.

Frances kept the telegraph wires busy, cabling family and friends, “I wish so much that you might be present at this moment of my greatest happiness,” and Mary and Charlotte Pickford arrived on the morning of November 2 to be witnesses. After a celebratory supper, Fred and Frances went back to the Algonquin, where he was decidedly uncomfortable. Not only was he too likely to be called Mr. Marion, he found the rooms small and the pretentiousness of the guests overwhelming. Yet there was no need to argue over where they would stay because there wasn’t time for it. They planned a European honeymoon, but first Frances had to return to Los Angeles to supervise the final titles for Pollyanna and Fred was anxious to see his family and have them meet his new wife.⁴¹