first, Frances was content to see Mary so happy. Frances thought Owen put Mary down to build himself up where Doug saw being with her as a verification of his own worth. He listened to Mary and valued her opinion. Owen was attractive, almost pretty, but slight in contrast to Doug’s strong physical presence. Although he was only about five foot eight, Doug radiated a charisma and sureness of his manliness that captivated Mary.5
As their affair blossomed, much of their energy went to keeping the romance a secret. There was, as always, the image to be maintained; they were both married to other people and Doug had a young son as well.
Although only eight at the time, Doug junior clearly remembers the first time he. met Mary. He was playing with his train set on the living room floor when his father brought Mary home to tea. His mother introduced this young woman as “America’s Sweetheart” and he wondered “how did such a little girl, only a little bit taller than I, get to be so important and go places alone?” Yet when she bent down on her knees and asked if she too could play with his trains, “Mary had made another conquest.” From that point on, Doug junior might be estranged from his father or clash with his mother, but he always viewed Mary as a friend and a “co-conspirator.”6
As enamored of Mary as Douglas was, he was not anxious to make any outward changes. Beth Sully Fairbanks was as much a mother and a manager for her husband as she was a wife—qualities he was not quick to discard. He thought it proper that to Beth the sun rose and set on him, but he needed even more. He “thrived only on the unbroken popularity of everyone,” says Margaret Case Harriman, daughter of the Algonquin owner, who knew Fairbanks all her life. She liked him enormously, but was clear about his limitations.
“Douglas Fairbanks was a man who never read anything. Even his method of deciding on scripts was to glance over them rapidly and then hand them to someone more fond of reading than he. . . . It was not a lack of intelligence or intellectual curiosity that prevented him, simply the fact that he couldn’t bear to sit still long enough. Father once said to me, in a bewildered kind of way, ‘I don’t know how I can be so fond of a man who has never read a book.’ ”7
So for those who knew Doug, it was amusing when a monthly column appeared under his byline in Photoplay in 1917, laced with self-deprecating humor and advocating “clean living.” Then he published a book entitled Laugh and Live, preaching optimism and “useful advice” such as to marry young and stay faithful.8
Frances found the blatant hypocrisy offensive and wondered if his insincerity extended to his relationship with Mary. But when she raised the possibility that she was being used by him, Mary was more than annoyed. “You have yours,” she retorted, “why shouldn’t I have mine?”
Close women friends knew Frances frankly enjoyed “jumping into bed with a man” she found particularly attractive and chided her for her “weakness,” but she defended herself by saying, “If you do the wrong thing at the right time you’ll have no regrets about having missed a snitch of fun.” Still, she cautioned Mary, “sin was not recognized as sin unless you were caught in the act” and with the complications of having a husband and a very public image, she was more likely to get caught. Her words brought only a frosty response from Mary and she knew she should keep her mouth shut until she was asked her opinion.9
Frances had to admit there were benefits to the affair: Mary was more cheerful than ever and while she had always thought of Mary as pretty, when “she was with Doug she actually looked sexy.” The situation also brought Frances in closer contact with Doug’s scenario writer, Anita Loos. Their paths had crossed in New York, but in their active participation in keeping the romance hidden, they became friends.
They used a variety of ruses, such as Mary and Frances making a public point of going horseback riding together and then as prearranged, secretly meeting Doug, who was riding with Anita. Doug and Mary went off, usually to his brother’s house nearby, and Frances and Anita rode together for an hour or two, then reunited with Doug and Mary before returning to the stables.10
Anita and Frances shared a variety of sensibilities, including their mixed emotions about Mary and Doug’s relationship and their belief in their own good fortune for being a highly paid part of this movie business. Anita too had spent her formative years in San Francisco, moving there from Shasta when she was four. Her father held a variety of jobs related to the theater and Anita took to the stage at an early age.
The family moved on to Los Angeles and then San Diego, where Anita watched the one-reelers shown between the live acts at her father’s theater and quickly ascertained a difference in their quality: the ones labeled Biograph were almost always superior. Copying the address from the film can labels, she sent off several story ideas to 11 East 14th Street in New York and to her everlasting joy and pride, back came a check for twenty-five dollars. The third one she sold, The New York Hat, was to be Mary Pickford’s last film for Griffith.11
When Frank Dougherty of Biograph in New York wrote that he was coming to Los Angeles in January of 1914 and “would like to have a personal interview” with her, she was enthusiastic at the prospect. She took the two-hour train ride up the coast with her mother, but when they arrived at the makeshift studio, D. W. Griffith was in the middle of filming Judith of Bethulia and Minnie Loos was so convinced it was a den of iniquity, she returned Anita posthaste to San Diego.
Although not quite five feet tall and looking much younger, Anita was twenty-six years old and had already proven herself capable of supporting herself. Yet the times and her own attitude mandated her obedience to her mother’s rare ultimatum: “I’ll never let you go back into that studio.”12
Anita found comfort at the local library, where she was influenced in equal measure by Spinoza, Kant, and Voltaire and the society sections of East Coast newspapers, and she used the nearby Hotel del Coronado, already famous as a winter resort for the rich, as a laboratory for experimenting with relationships. She had a series of wealthy boyfriends, including the heir to a Detroit fortune and the son of a United States senator, but she quickly realized men bored her as soon as they proclaimed their interest in her and she realized she was a complete failure as a gold digger.
She continued to send off her scripts to Biograph but kept her paychecks secret after several of her boyfriends made it clear they were threatened by her accomplishments. While her opinion of men in general and the rich in particular went down a few more notches, she began to plot her “escape by an archaic method that belonged back in the generation of my poor helpless mother.” In retrospect, Anita said, “I separated the men from the boys and purposely chose a boy” and recalled trying to back out of “the larcenous arrangement” at the last moment, but her mother wouldn’t budge because “I’ve already ordered the cake.”13
When Anita retold the story in later years she claimed her marriage lasted all of one awful night in a bungalow at the del Coronado and then she ran home to her parents. In reality, her marriage to Frank Pallma, a five-foot-tall composer and musician, lasted several months. When Anita did return to her mother, however, Minnie’s attitude was primarily one of relief that her daughter had lost her virginity in a respectable way and she saw no further impediment to her working in the movies.
Griffith was now at Triangle, busy building the sets for Intolerance, but welcomed Anita as a full-time writer. She quickly found her niche writing for Doug Fairbanks, confident that she was finally where she belonged.14
Like Frances, Anita made light of her scriptwriting, saying that once the plot was developed, “it was a breeze” and she had so much fun, it was almost a crime to be paid for it. But also like Frances, Anita got up before dawn to write and agonized over the words she chose. Frances preferred dictating, in part because the secretary was an audience whose reaction she could gauge,
