hole in her head and a small gun on the floor. They rushed her to nearby Fabiola Hospital, where she died at 9:30 that night without ever regaining consciousness.1
No one could provide an explanation for Maude’s suicide. Just thirty, she had been married to Wilson Bishop for more than ten years and he was doing well heading the San Francisco office of the Royal Insurance company; the San Francisco Chronicle went so far as to label him “a rich broker.” He claimed their marriage was a happy one and told the family he knew of no cause for Maude’s depression.
The combination of physical exhaustion and the devastating loss of her older sister drained Frances of what strength she had left; she collapsed and was hospitalized. She had not been home for over two years and she was riddled with guilt, thinking senselessly that if only she had written more often, stayed in closer touch, taken the time to visit, somehow her sister would be alive. Maude’s funeral was private and held three days after her suicide and even if Frances had been physically able to travel, the five-day train trip made it impossible to be there.2
Frances was more exhausted and malnourished than anyone knew, and after a week in the hospital, Marie Dressler took her to her Vermont farmhouse to convalesce. Marie cooked for her, sang, danced, and generally cajoled her back into living.
Yet as she slowly recovered, Frances found the quiet peace of the farm a bit unnerving and she began to worry about Marie. The improvements she had made to the farm, including all modern appliances, two guest houses, and a swimming pool, had to have cost a fortune. Animals were everywhere because Marie thought they were “cozy,” but she refused to kill or sell any of them. Frances was concerned Marie had created a “city dweller’s idea of a dream farm” and she was most distressed when she finally met Marie’s love, Jim Dalton, a New Englander whose wife would not divorce him.
He was younger than Marie and looked like a prosperous banker or businessman, but his “courtly manners” made Frances uneasy and she concluded they were carefully cultivated rather than “from the heart out.” When Marie said “How lucky I am to have him for my manager,” Frances found herself shivering at the thought. Marie was convinced “time will prove that I’m absolutely on the right track” about both Jim and the farm, but she admitted that every cent was tied up and she would welcome a movie offer.3
After a month of rest, Frances was back at World. Because of publishing deadlines, several weeks of Mary Pickford’s “Daily Talks” had been prepared in advance, but they would be the last. There was no one else Mary trusted to duplicate her thoughts and maintain her image and the syndicated column ended with Frances’s collapse.
With Brady’s support, she tried working at a slightly slower pace, completing and supervising scenarios at the rate of one every three weeks instead of two or three a month. And one of the first was Tillie Wakes Up for Marie. Frances’s script featured her as the belittled wife Tillie Tinkelpaw, not be confused with Tillie Banks of Tillie’s Punctured Romance or Tillie Blobbs of Tillie’s Nightmare, but if the paying audience made that mistake, so much the better.4
Frances was too occupied writing and editing scripts to be the on-set supervisor for Tillie Wakes Up, but she and Marie saw each other frequently and enjoyed New York’s nightlife together. When Enrico Caruso appeared at the Metropolitan in Carmen, he invited the women backstage before the performance and then insisted they stay, dressing them in costume and putting them both in the chorus. Caruso “sneaked up behind Marie and gave her a pinch on her bottom while he was singing an aria,” and Frances laughed over “the squawk she made, wanting to be heard.”5
Frances had been storing up ideas for an original story about the film business and used them in an innovative scenario called A Girl’s Folly, a behind-the-scenes look at moviemaking and a droll study of the powerful lure and inherent shallowness of stardom. Deference to the film industry is nonexistent—a black valet methodically signs the star’s signature to a large pile of photographs and the actors have no idea of the story they are in the middle of making. The film was cowritten and directed by the French-born Maurice Tourneur and their individual contributions are discernible from the opening scene.
A young girl from the country is sitting on a bench clutching a book, dreaming of worlds beyond her reach. In her imagination, a handsome troubadour appears and as she makes room for him on her bench, she is brought back to the real world with the arrival of the love-besotted local farmboy, Johnnie Applebloom. The beautifully lit fantasy sequence exemplifies Tourneur’s work with cameraman John van den Broek and the art director Ben Carré, while the ability to establish immediately her character’s dreams and situation in a single opening scene was becoming one of Frances’s hallmarks.6
Her skill at revealing thoughts and reactions through pantomime is again illustrated when the handsome matinee idol offers the initially innocent Doris Kenyon another means to the pretty clothes and high life she craves after her screen test is a failure. She shakes her head no and leaves, only to see his long, sleek limousine. As she all but caresses the car longingly, she glances up to see a bent, laboring charwoman, her obvious alternative career choice—cut immediately to Doris in a beautiful gown being fussed over by a maid. No titles are necessary to explain that she has become his mistress.
To save the rather daring plot from the censor’s wrath, the heroine returns home to the waiting arms of Johnnie Applebloom, but the unique movie-within-a-movie structure, the fantasy sequences, and the sardonic humor that infuses the entire film make A Girl’s Folly much more than a melodramatic lesson.7
Tourneur left World for a better offer at Paramount a short time later and after making three films with Olga Petrova, he was assigned to direct Mary Pickford in The Pride of the Clan, a Scottish drama shot in Massachusetts. Mary was still smarting from her previous film, Less than the Dust, directed by John Emerson. Not only had it met with critical pans but the studio was flooded with letters; her fans wanted Mary as a little girl and not a grown woman.8
More than her image was at stake. Mary and her mother knew that they had so far been successful in riding the crest of the wave that was to become known as “the star system.” Mary had been in the forefront of that revolution since 1912 when she became a well-paid pawn in the battle to break “the Trust,” the name commonly applied to the Motion Picture Patents Company controlled by Thomas Edison and the ten film companies holding patents on their movie cameras. In theory, all producers had to pay a license fee for the cameras and any exhibitors showing films made by non-Trust companies were threatened with having their supply cut off. But the demand for product had skyrocketed as theaters quadrupled in number and piracy thrived. Small companies proliferated and headed to California and Florida, in part for the sun, in part to steer clear of the vigilantes the Trust hired to maintain their lucrative control.
Carl Laemmle was a theater owner suffering from the shortage of films when he formed his Independent Motion Picture Company in open defiance of the Trust. He methodically chose a star a Trust company had created and offered “Little Mary—the girl with the curls” $175 a week. A doubling of her salary was too tempting for Mary and Charlotte to resist and they said a tearful good-bye to Griffith, but not before introducing him to her two childhood friends Lillian and Dorothy Gish.
Soon Mary was lured away from Laemmle, first by Belasco to return to the stage in The Good Little Devil and then in the fall of 1913 by Adolph Zukor to re-create her stage role on the screen for his Famous Players company. With each move, her salary and fame increased.9
The studio bosses knew that once the actors’ names were public knowledge costs went up, but in the rushed struggle to lure exhibitors away from the Trust’s films and then to compete with each other, the independent producers willingly paid the ever-increasing salaries, and the star system was born. And no star ranked higher than Mary Pickford.
