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Chapter 1

Marion Benson Owens first publicly documented her creative talents at San Francisco’s Hamilton Grammar School “when I was caught drawing cartoons of my teachers on the blackboard and was expelled from all public schools.” As a rule, she was very well behaved, having been taught early “the hypocrisies of social graces.” Yet while others might see her dismissal as something to be ashamed of, Marion was always to view it with a sense of accomplishment. Just twelve years old, she had been set apart from those she considered “fastidious and dull” and that was definitely a step in the right direction.¹

San Francisco in 1900 prided itself on being a cosmopolitan city, but the well-off and socially active Owens family at times stretched the limits of social acceptance.

Her father was born in 1857 in Council Bluffs, Iowa, where his parents had immigrated from Missouri when the Iowa Territory opened. Len Douglas Owens arrived in a prospering San Francisco at the age of twenty-four and quickly established himself in the advertising business. He was anxious to channel his ambitions and install himself in society, and Minnie Benson Hall, almost ten years his junior, had the bearing and the background to help him achieve his goals.

Born and raised in San Francisco, Minnie was the daughter of Charles and Aimee Grizwald Hall, who had “come around the Horn” to California from New York following the Gold Rush of 1848. Music was the foundation of the household. Charles owned a piano factory and played concert violin and Aimee was an accomplished soprano and pianist.

Minnie was not yet eighteen when she married the twenty-seven-year-old Len Owens in 1884. Over six feet tall with carved Welsh features, Len was the extrovert, serving on the board of the Olympic Club and becoming a champion pistol shooter and all-around outdoorsman. Minnie prided herself on creating a household that was a center for artists and visiting musicians like Italian soprano Luisa Tetrazzini, the Australian soprano Dame Nellie Melba, and Enrico Caruso.²

Their large house on O’Farrell Street also became home for Minnie’s aunt and uncle, George and Jane Benson, when they moved from New York shortly after the Owenses were married. George worked at a local lumberyard and Aunt Jane was a help as the children arrived; Maude in February of 1886, Marion on November 18, 1888, and Len junior in May of 1890.

Len senior organized a bicycle club for men and they rode all over northern California on the weekends. He became an investor in Aetna Springs, a six-hundred-acre ranch in the Pope Valley, and by 1896 he was the sole owner of the property. He created the Aetna Springs Mineral Water Company to bottle the water from its natural springs, promoted it as a drink of great “medicinal value” to those suffering from “neuralgia, indigestion, rheumatism, dyspepsia and many other ills,” and distributed it through his new drug and supply company south of Market Street.³

Len’s advertising business was also flourishing. He brought in Tom Varney and Charles Green as partners and their firm specialized in creating and posting signs on fences and in trolleys and streetcars. While Minnie was most comfortable in her roles as hostess and mother, Len’s life now took him everywhere but home. In the fall of 1898, he assured his wife he would always support her and the children, but he wanted a divorce.

Minnie and the Bensons stayed in the house on O’Farrell and the children continued to go to Hamilton Grammar School, less than two blocks from their home. Just before her twelfth birthday, Marion’s father told her he was marrying again. His fiancée, Isabel, was the eldest daughter of the celebrated and wealthy lawyer Edgar F. Preston. Eighteen years younger than Len, Isabel had never been married before and, unlike Minnie, was an outdoorswoman who shared his love of horseback riding and bicycling.⁴

Len and Isabel were married in June of 1901 to what the newspapers called “the excitement of the exclusive set,” and in spite of its being his second marriage, they were listed in the bible of society, the Blue Book. Unlike those in eastern cities, San Franciscans were proud not to attach a negative stigma to personal preferences and took their attitude as an outward sign of their sophisticated nature.⁵

Marion responded to her father’s remarriage by adopting an “I don’t care” attitude that culminated in her dismissal from school a few months later. She turned more than ever to her adored great-aunt and -uncle.

Aunt Jane, in her early sixties, was an amateur spiritualist and held weekly séances in the parlor. With the lights down low, up to a dozen elderly women held hands around the large round table and the sessions opened with a rendition of “Nearer My God to Thee.” Young Marion played the part of the channeler, using her free-floating imagination to give voice to historical figures and friends and relatives who had passed on.

Uncle George was a retired seaman with a full white beard and a vocabulary honed by his years at sea. He barely tolerated his wife’s dabbling with the other world and disapproved heartily of involving Marion in it. To give their niece what he considered a needed balance in her education, George took her with him to visit his old seafaring friends in the saloons of the Barbary Coast, where she listened to their stories of shipwrecks and the voyages of their youth.⁶

A bout with polio kept Marion at home for several months and she became a prolific reader. Tutors for Spanish, French, and music were brought in, but most of her waking hours were consumed with reading and writing in her daily diary, which she kept hidden under her mattress.⁷

While the family encouraged original thoughts, it was made clear that they should be kept to oneself to avoid offending others. Many evenings, the dinner table was enlarged for her mother’s guests and Marion learned early to be comfortable in an adult setting and how much easier things were for women and girls if they simply smiled and kept quiet. At the end of the day, there was always the diary to record what she really thought.

When Marion recovered from her polio, her mother decided it was time for her to be sent fifteen miles south to St. Margaret’s Hall Boarding School in San Mateo. With a reputation as an excellent preparatory school for the elite eastern women’s colleges, St. Margaret’s offered a strict academic curriculum, and the annual tuition of $500 assured economic exclusivity.

Established by the Reverend and Mrs. George Wallace in 1891, St. Margaret’s advertised aim was “to prepare its pupils to adorn the family and social circle, not only with intellectual culture, but also with graceful manners, refined tastes and Christian character” and to “secure a foundation for the super-structure of a noble womanhood.” While christian character with a small “c” would always come naturally to her, the daily dose of Episcopalian liturgy failed to inspire her. “I belong to no established faith—I never have,” Marion would make clear to anyone who asked.⁸

While schooling society’s daughters in their simple white uniforms, St. Margaret’s itself was rather stark, consisting of several wooden buildings fronting a wide dirt road laced with fruit and palm trees. The girls wrote and staged plays and were frequently taken to local lectures, allowed to visit the stores of San Mateo when chaperoned, and invited to dinners and dances at the large estates nearby.

Marion took the train to San Francisco on occasional weekends and school vacations. She and her brother and sister were welcome at her father’s new home at 3232 Jackson Street, but the addition of two half brothers, Edgar, born in 1902, and Francis the following year, made Marion uncomfortable and gradually she reduced her visits.⁹

In the summers, she traveled with her mother, going to Alaska one year and Mexico the next. Marion was becoming an astute observer of human nature and developing a radar for hypocrisy in all its forms. The stark contrast between the poverty of the people of Mexico and the riches of the churches seeded a lifelong resistance to organized religion, but she was thrilled to trek into the mountains with a group of Yaqui Indians, learning only afterward they had journeyed farther from the cities than any white women had previously dared. She took pride in improving her Spanish and furthering her belief, first instilled by her mother in particular and San Francisco in general, that women could go where their interests led them, as long as they outwardly appeared to behave themselves.¹⁰

In boarding school, Marion excelled at languages and music and blossomed as an artist under the tutelage of Charles Chapel Judson. When Judson, a respected painter active in the San Francisco Art Association, was asked to join the faculty of the newly created Mark Hopkins Art Institute, Marion begged her parents to allow her to transfer there.

After three years at St. Margaret’s, Marion was chafing to move on. She was drawing constantly, sketching every face she saw, as well as writing poetry and short stories. Family friends like the writers Jack London and Ella Wheeler Wilcox encouraged her to send off samples of her work to various publications and her poem “California’s Latest,” by Marion B. Owens, an ode to Luther Burbank’s daisy and illustrated with her own drawings, took up an entire page of Sunset magazine’s May 1905 issue.¹¹

That fall, the sixteen-year-old Marion was accepted at the Mark Hopkins Art Institute and the fact that it was housed in San Francisco’s most stately mansion and run in cooperation with the University of California at Berkeley gave it increased credibility in her parents’ eyes. She moved back in with her mother, Maude, Len junior, Aunt Jane, and Uncle George, where she was able to be a part of her parents’ society, spread her wings with her fellow students, and participate in the burgeoning Bohemian community.

San Francisco in 1905 was the largest city west of the Mississippi. One third of the population of 400,000 had been born on foreign soil, one third were children of immigrants. Almost 20,000 Chinese lived crushed into five square blocks and knew better than to go beyond Powell or Broadway. Danish, German, Polish, and various other recent European immigrants were almost as densely packed into tenements south of Market Street.

The rival Hearst and de Young families owned two of the three morning newspapers, and five weekly magazines provided a showcase for local writers. With its numerous theaters and urbane attitude, Will Irwin called San Francisco “the gayest, lightest hearted and most pleasure loving city in the western continent.”¹²

The Mark Hopkins Art Institute, quickly earning a reputation as one of the finest art schools in the country, became a magnet for society’s children, students from the new Leland Stanford University and the University of California and the literary and artistic hopefuls who migrated west seeking kindred spirits in the city that would become known as Baghdad by the Bay.

The art institute occupied an entire city block, its castlelike structure standing five stories high, topped by an elaborate tower with a magnificent view of the entire bay. Marion took her classes in the smaller rooms upstairs while the large first-floor salons were used as galleries. The murals on the walls, painted originally for Hopkins by the same Italian artists imported to decorate the saloons and brothels of the Barbary Coast, added a unique dimension to the decor and in the fall and spring, all of society flocked to the art institute’s major exhibitions.

In her off hours, both with friends and alone, Marion explored the city. She found the Italian area of North Beach provided reasonably priced three-course meals and bottles of table wine for twenty-five cents, and in the saloons and dining halls of the Barbary Coast, the buffet lunch was free when you bought a glass of beer for a nickel. Delmonico’s had a downstairs dining room, a second story with rooms for private parties, and a third floor with a discreet row of bedrooms for customers who couldn’t or didn’t want to go home, but the grandest of all establishments was the Palace Hotel. Built around a courtyard with an interior sparkling with cut glass and marble, it boasted telephones and bathtubs in every room. And from the Ferry Building at the end of Market Street, boats crossed the bay to the small towns of Oakland and Berkeley or over to Marin where Marion sketched Mount Tamalpais and the Pacific Ocean.¹³

Yet for all the wealth of intellectual stimulation and artistic inspiration, Marion’s attention became increasingly focused on her tall, young art teacher. Wesley de Lappe had only recently moved with his parents to San Francisco from Santa Rosa and family pressure to become a serious businessman lessened when he was hired as the art institute’s youngest instructor.

At five foot two with chestnut hair and deep blue eyes, the pretty, accomplished seventeen-year-old Marion had many admirers. Yet Wesley didn’t seem to notice her at all. Determined to catch his attention, Marion selected an outrageous hat covered with huge ostrich feathers for San Francisco’s Easter festivities and gave it full credit for finally turning Wesley de Lappe’s head. Less than two weeks later, on April 18, 1906, she and Wesley were sitting on a park bench, delaying the inevitable return home, when a loud, rumbling sound was heard throughout San Francisco that was to change their lives and their city forever.¹⁴

Streets literally opened up, buildings shook and crumbled. Marion and Wesley were petrified, but close enough to her home to reconnect with her family and physical safety. Almost every brick chimney in the city fell or was in danger of dropping onto the masses of people as they fled into the streets, screaming helplessly or wandering in quiet shock. Everyone was clutching someone or something: clothes, family silver, irreplaceable photographs, or jewels. For Marion, it was her ostrich feather Easter hat and Wesley de Lappe.

As devastating as the initial shock had been—later estimated to be 8.3 on the Richter scale—the fires that followed were what devoured the city. Gaslights crashed to the ground and electric wires short-circuited, sparking blazes everywhere. Water hydrants were useless; the underground pipes had been shattered by the quake.

Dynamite blasts vibrated throughout the city as a quarter-mile firebreak was created at Van Ness Avenue. The flames continued for three days and two nights and when they finally burned out, Chinatown, the Barbary Coast, the financial district, and the wooden tenements south of Market were nothing but ashes. More than 1,000 people died, 250 city blocks were devastated, and 300,000 men, women, and children were left homeless. “You have to forget the idea that there was a fire in San Francisco,” W. R. Hearst wrote. “There was a fire OF San Francisco.”¹⁵

The impact of the earthquake was not only physical. An atmosphere of equality and community spirit akin to the aftermath of war resulted as tents were pitched in vacant lots and parks and among the ashes of the Nob Hill estates. Debutantes and shopgirls, stockbrokers and beer hall bouncers all lived side by side for months. Children stood in lines several blocks long for free fruit and milk and the Red Cross distributed tins of food. Looters were shot on sight and bottled water became more valuable than gold.

Marion would later say that her family “lost everything” in the earthquake, but while their economic security was gone, their house remained standing. The Mark Hopkins Art Institute was obliterated, as was her father’s drug company and his warehouses. Len Owens had sold his interest in his advertising firm to concentrate on developing Aetna Springs as a summer resort, but now all available building materials were needed in the city and the economic demands of recovery left few with discretionary income for vacationing.¹⁶

Her mother was forced to forfeit any remaining hope of sending Marion to an eastern college. With her school and most vestiges of normalcy gone from the city, marriage became the next logical step, a way for her truly to be on her own. She openly enjoyed Wes’s “maulings,” as she called their lovemaking, and soon he was convinced that setting a wedding date was his idea.

In California a girl under eighteen and a boy under twenty-one had to have parental permission to marry. Though Len Owens was furious that Marion would even consider marrying a poor, nineteen-year-old artist—even though Wes had found work drawing for the San Francisco Chronicle—Minnie had been Marion’s age when she married and she resigned herself to her daughter’s determination. On Monday, October 21, 1906, Minnie accompanied Marion, Wes, and his father, Russell, to the temporary county offices in a converted house on Sacramento Street to sign the necessary papers for a marriage license.

Two days later, Marion’s older sister, Maude, recently married to Wilson Bishop, an up-and-coming insurance man, returned home to spend the night with Marion and early the next morning Wes and his sister Amy Belle arrived at the house to pick up Marion and Maude. Unsure of what to wear, Wes had bought four new ties the day before but forgot them all and then lost the ring as well. The girls waited patiently as he ran out to replace them and returned bedecked in his black wool suit, vest, and tie and with a new ring in his pocket, ready, as Marion said, “to be led to the halter.”

She had arranged for them to be married by her father’s former neighbor Reverend Bradford Leavitt, pastor at the first Unitarian Church. Yet as the foursome arrived at the Leavitt house on Jackson just in time for their eleven o’clock appointment, Wes realized that the only money he had left was a twenty-dollar gold piece; he did not want to give Reverend Leavitt more than ten dollars but was too embarrassed to ask for change. So out the door he headed again, down the steps and up the street. Maude ran after him, screaming for him to turn around as there were no stores in that direction. Marion and Amy Belle watched from the porch, laughing and crying at the same time.

The temperature was already in the seventies, and when Wes returned with the change, he was perspiring through his heavy clothes. Reverend Leavitt descended the stairs and tried to make the disheveled group comfortable, instructing Amy Belle and Maude to stand behind Wes and Marion, and proceeded with the brief ceremony in his downstairs parlor.

As he asked, “Wesley, do you take this woman to be your lawful wedded wife,” Marion looked up at Wes and saw what she thought was the “scardest, maddest, and percipitist bridegroom [sic]” she had ever seen and forgot her own whirling emotions for a moment. His forehead covered with sweat, his eyes darting in fear, Wes tried desperately to regain his composure and managed a very faint “Yes, sir.” Marion choked over her words as well. When they came to the moment he was to put the ring on her finger, the perspiration reached his eyes and he blindly grasped her hand.

“Marion . . . Marion, you . . . thee . . . with this wed . . . ring . . . I thee we . . .”

Reverend Leavitt’s smile broke the tension and Marion laughed out loud. Droplets were landing on her hand, but mercifully, the ceremony was over. Looking pale but grinning, Wes went off to work at the Chronicle and Marion, not giving up on all traditions, visited dressmakers to complete her trousseau with a new red suit and a selection of hats. For a honeymoon of sorts, they spent the weekend at a local hotel.¹⁷

Marion was selling occasional stories and paintings and Wes’s salary at the Chronicle was small but steady, yet economic realities mandated they live with their families. Four days after the brief ceremony, the newlyweds moved in with Wes’s parents and sisters on C Street in the Richmond district of San Francisco. After several months of restrained good behavior, Marion realized she had exchanged one set of watching eyes for another and, living with his parents, Wes seemed more of a son than a husband. Familiar with the constraints of sharing a roof with her own relatives, the couple moved in with her family.

Frustrated with what she felt were her limitations as a writer and an artist, Marion sought out her old family friend Jack London for advice.

“If you expect to write stories pulsing with real life or put upon canvas compositions that are divinely human, you must go forth and live,” he told her. “Study human nature by rubbing elbows with the people. Go out and work with them, eat with them, dream with them.”

Inspired by the dramatic seriousness of his words, Marion tried her hand at a variety of jobs. She pitted peaches at a local cannery until one slipped loose, hitting the woman working next to her on line. Accused of throwing it on purpose, Marion was given her walking papers ten minutes later.

She lasted an even shorter time as a telephone operator. Her head throbbed, her arms ached, and her ears rang from the callers’ “barbed wire voices.” Marion joked that she was fired before she could master any particular situation, but she turned the experiences into short stories and though most of them went unpublished, she consoled herself that she was practicing her art.¹⁸

Marion finally found steady employment as the assistant to the acclaimed photographer Arnold Genthe. He had risen to fame and fortune through his informal poses of society matrons and their families, but he also chronicled the streets of San Francisco and was known in Chinatown as “the white man with the camera.”

Genthe could not help but notice Marion’s beauty and she became his model as well. For a Baker’s Chocolate advertisement, he posed her with another young dark-haired beauty named Hazel Tharsing, just out of Catholic school. Hazel soon would shed her convent restrictions, change her name to Carlotta Monterey, and eventually marry Eugene O’Neill.

The photographer promoted Marion as “one of the ten most beautiful women in America,” but she was more comfortable on the other side of the camera. From Genthe she learned the art of layouts and experimented with color film. They discussed the philosophy books he loaned her and he introduced her to Minnie Maddern Fiske and other grandes dames of the stage, who always scheduled photographic sessions with “Ginky” when they visited San Francisco.¹⁹

Marion and Wes finally found a small place of their own on Gratton Street near Golden Gate Park, and that meant depending only on each other when it came to the daily minutiae of life. Marion loved to cook and entertain, but planning, shopping for, and preparing dinner on a daily basis were something else again. So was dodging the landlord when the rent was due. And occasionally, Wes would “forget he was married,” as Marion politely put it, and stay out all night.²⁰

Wes was unhappy at the Chronicle, where he sketched trials and society matrons, and wanted to devote full time to his art. Marion’s work for Genthe was lessening as the photographer began spending more time in Carmel, where Jack London, George Sterling, and other established writers and artists had small homes. With money too often becoming an issue between them, they moved back with Marion’s family.

In her letters written at the time, Marion is content but clearly in control of the relationship. Her real excitement was saved for her work and she describes her drawings with a passion that is missing when she discusses her marriage. She respected Wes’s talent more than she did her own, but knew she was much more ambitious than he. She acknowledged her “marked ability at catching a small likeness of any one I sketched or painted,” but considered it “a small skill.”²¹

Wes was becoming renowned for his use of colors, winning prizes and having his paintings published as magazine covers, but the recognition did not transfer into a large income. The romantic notion of two artists eking out an existence to pursue their dreams lost its luster in the reality of living from payday to payday and Wes and Marion agreed to separate. She publicly announced that two artists in one family could “not be a success” and on October 11, 1910, he filed for divorce on the grounds of extreme cruelty. When Marion was served with papers, she did not respond. From her own parents’ example, divorce was not something to be ashamed of and, since there were no children, she saw the experience as a “youthful indiscretion” and moved on.²²

Marion took assignments as a commercial artist for companies like the Western Pacific Railroad. She painted landscapes of the vistas seen from the train, which were used as posters and dining car menu covers. She wrote poems to accompany the paintings and signed them Marion de Lappe:

A magic web, a sylvan dream Where sunlit pale green waters gleam And rocks rise clear to guard the stream Oh the golden Feather River In cloistered canyons soft winds sigh And lavish lights from a summer sky Blue mirrored in the shallows lie Oh the golden Feather River.²³

Hoping that writing under deadline would hone her skills, Marion went to work as a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner for fifteen dollars a week. However, her sympathy for victims prevented her from writing flamboyantly enough for William Randolph Hearst’s news desk and she was transferred to the theater department.

Marie Dressler was billed as “the funniest woman of the English speaking stage,” and when one of the most experienced reporters gave Marion the assignment to cover the renowned vaudevillian’s opening in Tillie’s Nightmare in March of 1911, she couldn’t believe her good fortune.²⁴

“It’s the chance of a lifetime, kid,” he told her. “Dressler is news. Get some sketches, a signed interview and they’ll give you a spread under Ashton Stevens’s review of the play.” Almost as an afterthought he added, “Of course, you’ll get canned if you come back without them.”

Taking his word as gospel, Marion joined the throng of reporters at the star’s door at the Savoy Theater. Miss Dressler greeted them with “Hi ya, pals,” and answered their questions with self-deprecating humor. Marion stood quietly in a corner until the famous comedienne looked directly at her and said, “Hello, little girl, Where’d you come from?”

“The Examiner,” Marion replied—to instant silence.

Everyone but Marion knew that William Randolph Hearst and Marie Dressler were in the midst of a fierce feud and as the reporters looked back at Marie for a response, she ordered Marion to get out, then turned and stormed to her dressing room, sharply slamming the door.

Backstage quickly emptied, but Marion stayed frozen in her corner. Several times during the performance, Marie swept past her looking straight ahead, and when the show was over and the theater dark, the star emerged from her dressing room dressed in her street clothes, a plumed hat, and a fur coat. Marion, still in her same corner, called out, “Miss Dressler, if I don’t get this interview, I’ll lose my job.”

Marie stopped, turned, and asked, “Is that what those bastards told you?

“Only a top reporter, but he said I’d be made if I got the story and fired if I didn’t.”

Marie shook her head in disbelief and took pity on the girl twenty years younger than she and half her size.

“Let’s go into my dressing room child and I’ll give you the golldarndest interview I ever gave to any reporter.”

Marie sent her maid to the corner to bring back coffee and “a couple of oyster loaves.” Marion started sketching and Marie explained her change of heart.

“Child, I couldn’t brush aside a young girl struggling to get along. Believe me, I’ve had some tough breaks myself. Imagine starting out in the theatrical business with a face like mine when beautiful girls are all the vogue. I said to myself, ‘You’re going to make the whole world laugh at you’ and that’s exactly what I have done.” She had risen to become the star of Tillie’s Nightmare, running for a year at the Herald Square Theater, in New York and now she was traveling the country in a private train with ten cars and a dining room that never closed.

Marion drew and wrote frantically for more than an hour, listening to the laughter that punctuated Marie’s stories but sensitive to the sadness that underlay even her funniest tales. They left the theater together and Marie offered her a ride. As Marion started to get out, Marie patted her cheek. “I’ve always wished I had a daughter,” she said, and with a smile added, “I’ll see you again.”²⁵

Marion ran up the stairs to the Examiner offices, quickly wrote the story, and turned in her drawings. Though Marie wrote Hearst a note the next day that ended their feud shortly thereafter and they remained friends the rest of their lives, at the time it was enough to keep Marion’s story out of the paper. It was widely known and respected that she had broken down Dressler’s resistance, but the experience increased Marion’s self-doubts and her questions about what she was doing.²⁶

San Francisco was almost completely rebuilt and Marion agreed with the visiting Englishwoman Beatrice Webb, who called it a “veritable paradise” for anyone “who wishes to live unto himself without any pressure of law, custom or public opinion.” Marion had already seen and accomplished a great deal and enjoyed her reputation as “The Wild Rose of Telegraph Hill” with her artist friends, who valued talent before commerce, but at the age of twenty-two she felt the need to escape. Escape from what or to where, she wasn’t sure.²⁷

Then along came a man offering to make the decisions for her. Robert Dickson Pike was a Stanford graduate, a member of the Bohemian Club, and a rising star at his father’s fast-growing steel firm. In many ways, he was the antithesis of what Marion had been seeking for the past five years, yet Robert represented a level of economic security and social acceptance that was very tempting. The deciding factor for Marion was that her father and Robert’s traveled in the same circles and her engagement garnered Len’s approval like nothing she had accomplished before. And in place of her self-doubts and the often trying challenge of living on her own, Robert told her she was talented and beautiful and made it all seem so easy.²⁸

As Robert Pike’s fiancée, Marion officially entered the realm of the society women Arnold Genthe regularly photographed and it was one of his pictures of her, looking out from under a broad-brimmed hat, that appeared as her engagement picture on page one of the San Francisco Call.

Marion was labeled a “philosopher, artist and society girl—to say nothing of being pretty” who had “decided between the bountiful life of a comfortable wife and the leanness that often attends the struggles of the ambitious.” While the article pointed out she had “achieved more than ordinary success” as an artist and “received flattering offers from the east,” Marion claimed, “All of my ambitions are laid aside. This, I hold, is substantial proof that I am truly and unreasonably in love.”²⁹

With her final divorce papers signed the week before, Marion’s and Robert’s families and a few friends gathered at six o’clock on Tuesday evening, November 14, 1911, at the Swedenborgian Church, where once again Reverend Leavitt, under more formal circumstances, performed the marriage ceremony. A reception and dinner followed at the Pikes’ luxurious apartments at the Fairmont Hotel.

When Marion and Robert became engaged, they intended to spend their honeymoon abroad and live in New York, which, as the papers pointed out, “is so convenient to the capitals and art centers of Europe.” But by the time of the wedding, their plans had changed. Business at C. W. Pike’s was booming and Charles Pike needed his eldest son in Los Angeles to open a branch office. Charles had assured the East Coast steel and iron companies his firm represented of his ability to sell their products throughout California and Robert promised Marion that after a year or two at most in Los Angeles, they would move permanently to Paris, where she could study art at the Sorbonne.³⁰

It seemed like a reasonable compromise at the time.