and encouraged actresses such as Gene Gauntier, Cleo Madison, and Dorothy Davenport to direct. Lois also had a sense of purpose that went beyond the creative spirit that drew others to the business.
As a child in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, she studied music and toured as a concert pianist until a piano key broke during a recital and she lost all nerve to play in front of an audience. Working as a Church Home Missionary in the poorer sections of Pittsburgh, she was frustrated by the seeming futility of one-on-one conversions and her uncle advised her to take up acting.
“As I was convinced the theatrical profession needed a missionary, he suggested that the best way to reach them was to become one of them so I went on the stage filled with a great desire to convert my fellowman.”34
Joining a Chicago stock company, she soon married their star actor and stage manager Phillips Smalley, the good-looking grandson of Oliver Wendell Holmes. Lois’s acting was praised for “radiating domesticity” and critics claimed she was “at her best playing the young matron,” but when she left the company to keep house for Phillips, she soon tired of not working and found a job with the Gaumont film company, where she was encouraged to write, act, and try her hand at directing. Her husband soon joined her and they quickly established themselves as codirectors, with Lois writing all the stories and acting in many of them.35
They moved between a series of studios before signing with Universal in Los Angeles, where Lois became known for her sophisticated camera angles and split-screen techniques. Universal supported the Smalleys with budgets that allowed for such luxuries as paying $1,200 for a small island that they then blew up for cinematic effect, yet they felt constrained by the demand for two two-reel films a month and the perceived “envious eyes” of their coworkers. Phillips particularly courted the attention of the press and Jean Darnell’s “Studio Chat” column in Photoplay barely let a month go by without mentioning the couple.36
In April of 1914 Lois and Phillips spent a month filming in Laguna Beach, where they met Hobart Bosworth, a respected Broadway actor whose tuberculosis had driven him to seek California’s recuperative climate. He had reluctantly become a motion picture actor five years earlier when offered $125 to star in The Power of the Sultan for Selig, filmed at a Chinese laundry because the backdrops could be hung on the clotheslines. He moved on to producing his own films and, an ardent Jack London fan, he wrote, directed, and starred in The Sea Wolf, a seven-reel film made for $9,000. With the $4 million in profits it brought in, he created his own studio.37
Bosworth’s conversations with Lois and Phillips turned to their desire to make films of whatever length and subject they chose and he invited them to work with him. Wide distribution of their films would be assured as he was in the process of joining forces with Famous Players and Jesse Lasky to form Paramount Pictures.38
By early summer of 1914, the Smalleys were at the Bosworth studios and Lois was directing her first film. When Marion arrived for her appointment, she was ushered past actors re-creating the French Revolution and into an office to be introduced to “a tall woman, with classical features. She seemed to glide rather than walk, her head held high and tilted slightly backward, her ample breasts preceding her well-corseted body.” Marion thought she most closely resembled a figurehead on a sailing ship.39
As Lois sat behind a large desk and looked through Marion’s portfolio of drawings, she began the conversation by telling Marion how much she enjoyed finding new talent. Marion “told her how much I wanted to design costumes and sets in a movie studio” and their shared love of filmmaking permeated their discussion. Yet when Lois asked, “Would you like to come under my wing as one of my little starlets?” Marion was not sure she understood. She reiterated that her experience was as an artist and a writer; she was interested in working “on the dark side of the camera.”40
Lois assured her that at most studios, and at Bosworth in particular, everyone did a little of everything. She was offering her a position as her assistant and protégée where she would work in every stage of production, including in front of the camera. When the director said, “I’m sure we can match whatever salary you are making now” and then asked, “How soon can you start?” Marion knew she had found a new home.
Lois was cognizant that she was hiring more than a bright and talented young woman; she was also ensuring a connection with a close friend of Adela Rogers, the rising star reporter of the Los Angeles Herald. And while this was a greater entrée into the world of filmmaking than Marion had dreamed possible, there were compromises to be made. She was to be listed on the studio books as an actress and with a new name.
A few months short of her twenty-sixth birthday, Marion Benson Owens de Lappe Pike signed her contract with Bosworth Inc. as “Frances Marion, Actress, Refined type, age 19.”41
Chapter 3
The Bosworth complex on Occidental was, for its time, state of the art. It had been built from the ground up as a year-round studio, in contrast to the many other companies that used vacant buildings on the empty lots during the winter months. (The term “shooting on the lot” came about because that is exactly what they were doing.)
The executive office building was two stories of steel and concrete and housed the accounting department, scenario writers, and editors. A theater was attached to the laboratory where thousands of feet of film were printed each day. There was a carpenter’s shop and a huge property room with a door designed so trucks could load up the sets and roll them directly onto the stage. A glass roof opened or was covered with canvas to allow for ventilation and a release of the intense heat from the lights that plagued other studios.1
Lois Weber was in the middle of Traitor when Frances started working at Bosworth. She did whatever needed doing: writing press releases, moving furniture on the sets, painting backgrounds, and mastering the art of cutting film. She learned to respect continuity and ensure that the same prop was held in the same hand when scenes were shot out of sequence. One of her first friends at Bosworth was a young man with a similar sense of responsibility, a fellow San Franciscan named Sidney Franklin, and Frances said, “No one would have been surprised to see us sweeping the floor.”2
Bosworth’s cameraman George Hill, the first cinematographer to see his name on the screen in the credits for The Sea Wolf, became enamored of Frances. He was tall, good-looking, and seven years younger than she, but Frances was not about to enter a serious relationship. Robert was spending more of his time in San Francisco and she was practically living at the studio so it was easy to postpone dealing with their failing marriage.3
In addition to her role as Lois’s assistant, Frances appeared in front of the camera, but for a reason she found acceptable: the sophistication of the moviegoing audiences was growing and word was filtering back that it was not only the deaf who read lips. Extras were being caught in conversations totally unrelated to the action, and with Lois’s zeal for detail, she asked Frances to write pertinent lines of dialogue for the extras to say and then work among them in costume. Dressed as “a gypsy, barmaid, nun, prisoner and slut,” she consoled herself with the knowledge that she was actually writing for films, even if it was mostly one-liners.
Her every skill and experience were called upon, including horseback riding when she doubled for the star Winifred Kingston in Captain Courtesy, an action-packed “Robin Hood in early California” five-reeler. And when Lois asked her to create a stage name for her newest “starlet” from Kansas, Olga Kronk, she “suggested ‘Claire’ because she was a natural blonde with delicate features and light complexion and ‘Windsor’ because she suggested aristocracy.” Frances worked longer hours for less pay than she ever dreamed she would, loving
