and their joy turned to terror as they fought a mob of fans to escape the theater.
Police were called in and when they finally reached a taxi, Mary’s hat and coat had been ripped to shreds. Frances genuinely feared for their lives, but there was no denying the exhilaration of Mary’s fame and success. Rushing to share the news with their mothers, Frances and Mary realized they had allowed their confidence in their work to be eroded by the studio bosses and vowed to each other that they would never again trust the reaction to any film, particularly a comedy, screened in private without a real audience.21
Mary and Frances were more than vindicated as The Poor Little Rich Girl met unprecedented financial and critical success. In May 1917, Famous Players Lasky announced that Frances Marion was being signed at $50,000 a year “to prepare special features for Mary Pickford,” starting with Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Her contract specifically stated, “Throughout the production, Miss Marion will continue by the side of the star and the director.”22
The entire press release was printed verbatim in Moving Picture World and it was better than any formal apology. After a year and a half of honing her skills at World and credited with writing fifty films, Frances happily returned to Los Angeles, where she was played up in the press and the movie magazines as a gorgeous blue-eyed beauty with brains and a growing bank account. She was twenty-eight, but the trades called her either “very young” or in her “early twenties,” and Photoplay announced that the Hollywood “highbrow colony has been augmented by the arrival from New York of Miss Frances Marion.”23
Even though she had been gone for less than two years, Frances found the transformation in the landscape and the industry immense. There was still the aroma of orange blossoms, but new tall buildings actually created a downtown skyline and while events or parades were still occasionally used as backdrops, the growing popularity of films had made onlookers a problem for the moviemakers. Studios were being fenced in and location shooting had become a planned outing. Carl Laemmle turned the fans’ curiosity to his advantage at his new 230-acre Universal City in the valley—for twenty-five cents each, five hundred people a day toured the studio and were given a box lunch while they sat on bleachers watching movies being made. Films were becoming so socially acceptable that the internationally acclaimed poet Vachel Lindsay wrote a book of praise entitled The Art of the Motion Picture comparing movies to great paintings and sculpture.24
Hollywood, incorporated fifteen years before with a population of 166 by a prohibitionist from Kansas, now boasted almost 30,000 residents. Still unconvinced about which neighborhoods would increase in value, Charlotte counseled Mary and Frances to rent and they leased houses two blocks from each other on Western Avenue between Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards, 1519 and 1748 respectively. Both houses were two stories high with expansive yards and Frances chose a white clapboard with a visible brick foundation and a porch that reached all across the front entrance and around the sides. She added accoutrements like rocking chairs under the palm trees for relaxing and always kept a lap board handy so she could write anywhere inspiration seized her. Minnie helped her move in and stayed for another month before returning home to San Francisco.25
The address of Frances’s studio was the same—201 North Occidental—but almost everything else had changed. The name over the old Bosworth gate now read “Famous Players-Lasky-Morosco Studio” and it had increased in size and scope. A new large bungalow was being built just for Mary with a kitchen, a dining room, a bathroom, a dressing room with walls of mirrors and lights, and a huge closet. It was designed in an Oriental style, complete with a Japanese garden. “How pretty,” beamed Mary, charmed by the little house as if it were a complete surprise and not a contractual obligation. “It’s the first time I have ever felt like a star.”26
With her new contract that put half of each film’s profits into her own pocket, Mary wanted to be surrounded by those she considered peers and equals. Her best friend was her scenario writer and now she told Zukor she wanted their old pal Mickey Neilan signed to a two-year contract as her director.
Mickey had been working around movies since Griffith had spotted the good-looking Irish charmer working as a chauffeur in 1910 and put him in front of the cameras. He spent two years bouncing between film companies with Allan Dwan, traveling throughout California and Mexico making a picture a week and two a week when they wanted time off, sharpening his skills while maintaining his cavalier outlook toward work. He had been directing for Selig and then Famous Players–Lasky for the past year and had just completed several films starring Jack Pickford. Mary’s brother’s contract with the studio may have been because of her, but his lightweight comedies held their own in box office returns. Mickey and Jack shared a tremendous capacity for alcohol and the attitude toward life that accomplishment was one thing, responsibility another. Mickey’s first order of business after signing Zukor’s contract at a huge increase in salary was to take a monthlong vacation in New York.27
Before the new team could start filming, Mary had to finish DeMille’s The Little American. With Mickey in the East, Frances went to work with another Famous Players–Lasky star, her old friend Sessue Hayakawa. Sessue had worked steadily since their days at Ivy’s, but after playing a rich Japanese playboy in DeMille’s The Cheat, he could carry his own film.28
Frances wrote The City of Dim Faces with Sessue as the son of a Chinese merchant who falls in love with a white woman while at college and brings his fiancée home, with tragic results. She set her original story in San Francisco’s Chinatown in order to film it on location, for she had not been home for over three years.
No one would have known there had been an earthquake and fire only a decade before. Downtown glistened with tall buildings and flower stands stood on every corner. Chinatown had been completely rebuilt, but the location shooting was encumbered by armed guards assigned to stay with the crew because of a still smoldering tong war. Only days before they arrived, snipers had attacked in broad daylight and several dead Chinese had been pulled from the bay.
Frances was slightly offended when none of her old friends inquired about Hollywood or moviemaking, and when one woman who had never been south spoke with disdain about Los Angeles, Frances was surprised to find herself defending her adopted home. She was troubled by the small world outlook of a city she had once considered so sophisticated and consoled herself that had her old Bohemian friends not scattered all over the globe, they would have been interested in her work and this new art form. San Francisco was still beautiful; she would always love it and consider herself fortunate, at times almost superior, for having been born and raised there. But it was never quite the same place for her after The City of Dim Faces.29
As Mickey, Mary, and Frances reunited in Los Angeles in July of 1917, American troops were just landing on the battlefields of Europe. The United States had declared war on Germany in April and Mary’s The Little American had a war background. Both of her DeMille films featured her as a mature woman and while they had resulted in some profits, her fans clamored to have her play a young girl once more.30
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm cast her as that child again and Frances saw the effect that the lack of a real childhood had had on Mary. She reveled in clowning in the circus scenes, not reliving past adventures but experiencing them for the first time. Frances put vignettes from her own childhood into the script, such as when at her father’s resort she and her friends created a zoo and needed a zebra—the one available horse was too mean so they painted the cow black and white instead. When she shared these tales with Mary, her initial laughter turned to tears as she sobbed that she had been “the most miserable kid in the world,” for all the shows she had been putting on as far back as she could remember had been on the stage.31
In becoming Mary Pickford, she had accepted the role of provider and all the responsibilities that went with it. When asked about their childhood, her sister, Lottie, simply responded,
