to Write for the Movies and it was selling briskly at a dollar a copy. Scenario writing was touted as “a new profession for women” and Marguerite Bertsch, Daisy Smith, Catherine Carr, and Josephine Recot were highlighted in the press as names to watch. In fact, women were at every level of moviemaking, but an important reason they were welcomed and appreciated and even occasionally nurtured and promoted from within was that movies were not taken seriously as a business.15
Yet once Frances was ensconced at Balboa, she found “the promise of a writing job was as empty as a blown egg.” She was paid all right—to play minor roles in westerns and costume dramas. She couldn’t understand it. When she watched herself on the screen, she saw “a tall, gawky girl whose waving arms looked like two busy windmills, a stranger who made a few grimaces and then dashed off again.” Her only solace was the new friends she was making, especially another scenario writer, Bess Meredyth.16
Bess had been precociously enterprising as a young girl in her hometown of Buffalo, New York, where her father managed a local theater. Born Helen Elizabeth MacGlashin, she became a talented pianist in her teens and spent a year with several maiden aunts in Detroit. Her parents were pleased with her musical accomplishments, but horrified when one of the aunts began touring with a group known as The Ladies Whistling Chorus. The red-headed, vivacious Bess returned to Buffalo to play concert piano, but discovered her true métier by winning a writing contest sponsored by the local newspaper. She was paid a dollar for each of her daily columns and after what she called a marriage that lasted “five and a half minutes” she took her savings and set out on a national concert tour.17
Arriving in Los Angeles in the winter of 1911, Bess found work as an extra with Biograph and took the stage name of Meredyth from her family tree. She realized she could make more money if she wrote scenarios in addition to acting and jumped between assignments for several studios, churning out one-reelers, serials, and action dramas.
Bess and Frances shared a strong sense of humor and fierce ambition. Both women viewed their earliest marriages as minor indiscretions, but Frances felt a pang of jealousy over Bess’s freedom, living alone in a bungalow at the foot of the Hollywood hills, surrounded by her dogs, with a room of her own to write in. Engaged to Wilfred Lucas, a young actor and director with whom she shared her passion for films, Bess seemed so confident that the next job would always be right around the corner.18
And it didn’t help when Frances visited Universal and Lois Weber chided her for not coming with her. Her Morosco friends Lon Chaney and Bob Leonard were there as well as Hobart Bosworth, sufficiently recovered to act in films and free from the burdens of running his own studio. It seemed that everyone but Frances was sure of the path they were taking.19
Suffering from professional self-doubt only intensified Frances’s awareness of how little she had in common with Robert. They had hardly seen each other over the past year since his father closed his Los Angeles office in 1914. Robert returned to San Francisco and they both admitted there was no reason to keep up the pretense of a relationship. Claiming responsibility for the failure of her marriage, Frances refused any financial settlement. She told herself she should have known better than to marry someone to whom society and respectability were so consequential. Although her San Francisco roots would always be important to her, for better or worse, Los Angeles was home.
Knowing Frances was unhappy at Balboa and in her marriage, Mary Pickford offered her a job. Frances did not want to act, but if everyone was going to keep propelling her in front of the camera, she preferred to work with people she liked and respected. “When Mary said, ‘We’ll have fun together,’ all my resistance fled and I signed on the dotted line.” She would be paid to act, but Mary promised to let her work on the scenarios as well.
Frances moved into a bungalow in the same courtyard where Mary and her mother were living. Charlotte Pickford viewed living on the West Coast as a temporary situation. Perusing the still developing neighborhoods of Los Angeles, she invested Mary’s income in land but not houses and insisted they continue renting. The poverty of their earlier years influenced every decision Charlotte made and she made all the decisions.
The rooms in the bungalows were small, the overhead lights were too bright, and the plaster on the walls looked like “an advanced stage of smallpox,” but there were spacious vine-covered porches to enjoy on warm evenings. All in all, Frances considered the change a small price to pay for her freedom and at twenty-six with two marriages behind her, she was truly on her own for the first time in her adult life. It felt a bit precarious, but living near and working with Mary was a dream come true.
Charlotte and Frances liked each other immediately. Whereas others saw Charlotte as an oppressive influence, Frances saw genuine love and caring and in turn, Mary’s mother welcomed her daughter’s having a real friend and confidante. And being with Mary every day deepened Frances’s appreciation for her discipline and experience.21
Mary had been making movies since she presented herself as an experienced Broadway actress to D. W. Griffith at Biograph, a former mansion turned studio in lower Manhattan, in April of 1909. A frustrated stage actor who had turned to directing a little over a year before Mary arrived on the doorstep, Griffith had already made more than one hundred films. Mary knew movies were a comedown, but it was the off season and money had to be made. The five dollars a day Biograph was paying would not be sufficient; “I must have ten,” Mary announced with such surety that Griffith agreed to pay. She was immediately put to work in Her First Biscuits, a three-quarter-reel comedy, and in less than a year, she appeared in almost fifty movies.22
Under Griffith’s direction, and through working with his cameraman Billy Bitzer, Mary learned the technical side of moviemaking. During the filming of Friends, Bitzer physically moved the camera in toward the stage so that only Mary’s face and upper body filled the lens; the term “close-up” was being added to the vocabulary and the distinction between the stage and film was being formalized. Cameras had been moved since early cinema, but Griffith “used it with such finesse and with such emotional power that it was easy to imagine he invented the close-up.”23
Frances and Mary were at the Famous Players studio on Melrose by seven every morning and Frances devoted herself to writing and watching as she worked on the scenarios with Mary, her director James Kirkwood, and her costar Mickey Neilan. They quickly turned out Fanchon the Cricket, Little Pal, and Rags before Frances was cast as “the wicked sophisticate” Rosanna Danforth who has her eye on Mary’s beau in A Girl of Yesterday.24
In her role as a vamp, Frances was called upon to woo a pilot and Glenn Martin, a local aviator, was hired. Flying a plane was an everyday occurrence for Martin, but once filming had started, he claimed “nobody told me I’d have to kiss girls.” He refused to go through with that part of the plot “because my mother wouldn’t like it,” until the Famous Players studio head, Adolph Zukor himself, came on location to Griffith Park and insisted Martin give Frances at least a little peck.25
Frances took it all in good humor and had a great time, especially when the cameras weren’t rolling. The huge yacht of the San Francisco multimillionare John D. Spreckles was featured in some particularly luxurious scenes and she enjoyed their director Allan Dwan, who had been working in films for over five years.26
Dwan sincerely liked people and was secure enough in his own abilities to include others in the process. The friendly atmosphere extended to his inviting everyone to his wedding to the actress Pauline Bush in San Juan Capistrano during a weekend break. Inspired by the church mission and in a burst of regret over the secret surroundings of their own wedding, Mary and Owen asked the priest to renew their vows in a Catholic ceremony. The service struck Frances as halfhearted at best. She knew how little time they spent together and had seen too much of Owen’s behavior and Mary’s unhappiness to put any faith in a ritual.27
After
