starring in Tillie’s Nightmare at the Keith theater, so they made a date for a late supper at the Algonquin.
“Now start from the beginning and if I interrupt like I always do, just step on my foot to shut me up,” Marie told Frances as she sank into a couch in the lobby. “I got a bunion that hurts if an ant walks on it.”
Marie was unique and Frances loved her for it, but before she could say much of anything, Marie started telling her about her latest Tillie film for the Lubin studios in Philadelphia and then began reliving the night’s performance in the theater. In full voice, she broke into the final stanzas of the show’s hit song, “Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl”:
Stand back there, villain, go your way, Here I will no longer stay; Although you were a Marquis or a Earl You may tempt the upper classes, With your villainous demi-tasses, But Heaven will protect the working girl.9
Applause burst forth throughout the lobby of the Algonquin just as it had hours before in the theater. Since the hotel was a magnet for the biggest stars of the stage, her presence had drawn little attention initially, but now diners grabbed paper from the writing desk for Marie to sign autographs and she basked in the attention without a hint of embarrassment. As the crowd thinned, Marie stuck out her foot again. “Now concentrate on my bunion and don’t let me interrupt again.”
Frances regaled her with the story of The Foundling, the fire, and landing the job at World. That very day she had “hit the jackpot again,” selling her magazine story “Woman Against the Sea” to the Fox studios.
“I’m going over tomorrow to sign on the dotted line.”
“Soak them for it,” counseled Marie. “The more they pay for anything, the better they think it is.”
“I might lose the deal,” responded Frances, still taking her success as more of a fluke than a certainty.
“Sissybritches,” said Marie, as only she could. “Have you forgotten already how you landed the World Films job? Pull the trigger the moment you step into the office. They’re used to being fired on.”10
The $5,000 Frances received for “Woman Against the Sea” was an enormous amount for the time and she took great pleasure in regarding it as retribution for William Fox’s condescending remarks of several months before. But the growth in her net worth also served as her only consolation as she learned that her story, based on the true adventures of a strong young Norwegian woman who captains a ship and handles a mutinous crew, had become The Iron Man starring William Farnum. When she asked if they were somehow writing the woman out of the plot entirely, Frances was introduced to a tall, fine-boned, and very poised young woman in a tea gown who held out her hand with dignity and assurance. Elda Furry was the antithesis of the physically strong woman Frances had imagined and when her face registered her bewilderment, the star’s response was ice cold.
“I am an actress, Miss Marion,” Elda said in a feigned aristocratic accent. “I have been schooled by one of the greatest actors on the American stage, my husband, De Wolf Hopper, and I am not afraid of any role.”
Frances had her money and her job at World and since The Iron Man or Woman Against the Sea or whatever they were going to call it was to be filmed on the California coast, she wouldn’t even be subjected to hearing about it.11
Work was so all-encompassing that Frances paid little attention to the outside world, but she participated on October 23, 1915, when more than thirty thousand supporters of women’s right to vote marched from Washington Square up to 16th Street. Two hundred fifty thousand cheering and jeering bystanders lined the streets as bands played “Tipperary” and men and women on horseback carried purple-and-gold banners. Society women like Mrs. Otis Skinner and grandes dames of the theater like Lillian Russell joined in support of the crusade that had been creating a growing national sensation without the desired result for almost seventy years.
Even the movies were paying growing attention to the issue, but usually with plots that painted suffragettes as frustrated, zealous women whose families suffered because of their devotion to the cause. Still, newsreels helped spread the word of the ever-increasing support for women suffrage.12
Frances and friends like Adela Rogers had marched in parades before, yet they nursed a nagging suspicion that women were “trading superiority for equality.” Women had been voting in California since 1911 and it seemed such an “obvious right,” it was almost insulting to have to convince others.13
Elsie Janis was back in New York as well, starring in Miss Information on Broadway. It was her first straight comedy show without the impersonations she was famous for and it folded after ten weeks. She had never faced anything less than a huge success and she and her mother, still so inseparable that Frank Case took to calling them “the Jani,” decided it was time for a change of scenery. Ma Janis found Phillipsburg Manor just outside Tarrytown in the Hudson Valley and the history of the house cemented the decision; George Washington had been in love with the original owner’s daughter and the bridge outside the house was featured in Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Yet it was only an hour from Broadway and close enough for weekend parties.14
A few weeks after the suffrage march, Frances took Elsie up on her invitation to a Tarrytown party. The leaves had already fallen from the trees in November of 1915 and it was a particularly dismal day, but she bought a guidebook and familiarized herself with the local history and was enchanted with the small towns and the estates that dotted the roads.
As Frances arrived at the main entrance of the sprawling manor, she was greeted with a rush of hands and smiles, mostly from people she had never met before, and in the next room voices were singing “Won’t You Come Home, Bill Bailey.” Elsie whisked her through the house for a quick tour: room after room with low ceilings that seemed like a labyrinth laced with a dozen fireplaces. When they returned to the drawing room, Ma Janis was presiding over the huge buffet table and Frances looked around at the eclectic gathering she knew would congregate only for Elsie.
Irving Berlin, William K. Vanderbilt, Frank Case and his fiancée, Bertha Grayling, Vernon and Irene Castle mixed with token English royalty and chorus girls. Mary Pickford and Owen Moore were already in their separate corners when Frances arrived. With a glass in his hand, Owen looked particularly sullen and Mary went from attempts at polite conversation to sitting in a corner thumbing through a fashion magazine.
Some of the guests were starting to depart when Douglas Fairbanks and his wife, Beth, arrived. The actor’s first film, The Lamb, had just been released and was such a hit that D. W. Griffith signed him to a three-year contract. Frances knew them by sight from the Algonquin, where they had checked in only weeks before but felt very much at home because it had been their residence off and on during their eight-year marriage.15
Frances had also noticed their young son playing in the lobby, but neither of his parents was the type of person she was naturally drawn to; Douglas literally jumped over the sofas in the foyer and she saw “no spark of life” in Beth, whose very existence seemed to revolve totally around her husband.16
Even by his own standards, Doug was particularly animated at Elsie’s and with a hearty “Hello,” he shook Frances’s hand so hard she thought her arm might come out of its socket. With a deep bow, he presented himself to Mary and Owen and she complimented him on The Lamb, which she had just seen at the Knickerbocker. Doug may have been used to the spotlight, but he was not so egocentric that he failed to notice Owen’s almost disdainful treatment of Mary, who was so clearly worshiped by everyone else in the room.
Elsie had known
