of 1918, he decided to return to New York to direct George M. Cohan. The five films he had made with Frances and Mary constituted one of the longest professional relationships in his career and marked a level of success that was never to be seen again.41
There were changes in Doug’s film unit as well. His chief cameraman, Victor Fleming, was drafted and in October, Fairbanks announced that Ruth Allen, a writer who had been working with him for several months, was being promoted to head the scenario department, which included Anita Loos. Mary’s old director Allan Dwan was to alternate with John Emerson in directing and shortly thereafter Emerson and Loos left Fairbanks’s company to produce their own Paramount productions.42
Emerson had cultivated the press and he and Anita were played up as the brains behind Fairbanks’s success. Emerson believed in hiring his own publicity agents, fairly uncommon for directors at that time, and while Anita claimed to be “appalled,” she willingly posed for pictures. A six-part series ran in Photoplay under their byline and Doug tired of seeing himself billed with Emerson and Loos as equals in a “a triple alliance.”
John Emerson complained of throat problems in the first of many physical ailments that flared up whenever situations were not to his liking. Anita, in love with the seemingly indifferent director fifteen years her senior, went with him to New York to see medical specialists.43
With everyone else on the move, Frances filled in writing He Comes Up Smiling for Fairbanks and The Goat for Donald Crisp, and when her friend Sessue Hayakawa formed his own company, she wrote him a melodrama, The Temple of Dusk. She finished adapting Captain Kidd, Jr. for Mary and saw her through the transition to a new director. William Desmond Taylor had started in the business as an actor with Thomas Ince, and then moved to directing, first with Balboa and then American in Santa Barbara, where he had worked with both Lottie and Jack Pickford. Taylor was never to be the close friend Mickey was, but he was experienced, had worked with the family, and was welcomed accordingly.44
But for Frances, the joy and the challenge of being on the set each day with Mary and Mickey were gone. Her frustration over her own lack of participation in the war effort was building and she wondered how she could criticize the bosses’ attitude if she wasn’t actively involved herself.
Elsie Janis wrote from France, where she was entertaining the troops, and urged her to “get out of that artificial Hollywood atmosphere into life that is real, ghastly, forbidding, terrifying and magnificent,” and Frances’s desire to go overseas was cemented by reading Mary Roberts Rinehart’s latest novel, The Amazing Interlude. The story of a young American woman volunteer in a Belgian soup kitchen moved Frances to investigate the possibility of working with the Salvation Army in France. She even made contact with her old employer the San Francisco Examiner, suggesting that as a correspondent she could cover the activities of the women in the war and performers entertaining the troops.45
She talked to Mary about her new ambitions and Mary offered to help while asking for a favor. The government was encouraging movies that would inspire enlistments and she proposed filming Rupert Hughes’s short story “The Mobilization of Johanna.” If Frances stayed just long enough to write it, she would ask Al Cohn to use his Washington contacts to get her an appointment as an official government war correspondent.
Frances never could say no to Mary.
Chapter 7
Mary Pickford was married to one man and in love with another, but she still had an eye for a handsome face. In her position as their honorary colonel, she reviewed the troops of the 143rd Field Artillery and blew a special silver whistle to start the camp football game. On the field and at the dinner at the Hotel del Coronado that February evening in 1918, Mary spotted a six-foot-two, blue-eyed, sandy-haired fullback whose chiseled features stood out even in a crowd of good-looking men. She was careful to position herself next to him for the team picture.
Mary returned to Camp Kearney with Frances a few weeks later to finalize the arrangements for the 143rd’s appearance in Johanna Enlists. The two women toured the base hospital because Mary’s “find” from the previous visit was recovering from a broken leg. Frances had to agree that Fred Thomson was something to look at and while Mary went on with her “colonel’s duties,” Frances stayed behind to talk with the handsome patient.
The lieutenant had just turned twenty-eight when Frances, almost thirty, met him at Camp Kearney and she soon realized he was no ordinary man; Frederick Clifton Thomson was the chaplain of the 143rd and a world champion athlete.1
Frances went to church only to get married or to witness someone else doing the same and while she still rode horses occasionally, she had no interest in sports. Had she ever read the sports section, she might have recognized Fred, for he had run, hurdled, and thrown his way to the title of All Around Champion Athlete of the World at the National Amateur Athletic Union’s Field and Track Championship in Chicago in 1910. Since he was a native of Pasadena, the local papers often ran articles under his byline about the virtues of clean living.2
But as Fred and Frances spent the afternoon talking, they realized they had met their respective match. He was well read and a musician and mathematician by avocation with a breadth of knowledge she had rarely encountered—certainly never in someone so good-looking.
“No one had written more satirically about ‘love at first sight’ than I,” Frances admitted, but that night she told Mary it had happened to her. She knew that if she had penned such a scene it would have been discarded as too far-fetched, but the truth was that the experienced and sophisticated writer had fallen in love with a straitlaced, God-fearing Boy Scout.3
Behind the smiling, competent, and assured veneer, there was a complicated man who, as the third of four brothers, had been beaten by his minister father, “always in the name of God.” He had grown up aiming to please, watching and then weaving his way through the patterns of behavior that would result in peace, yet developing his own moral compass, a strong backbone, and a list of very real accomplishments.4
Fred Thomson’s mother, Clara, was a four-foot-eleven-inch powerhouse, the only survivor of thirteen children after her father caught tuberculosis and fatally infected all her brothers and sisters. Clara had married a medical student, James Harrison Thomson, on what turned out to be his deathbed and, a young widow overnight, she went on to Wooster College in Ohio. She earned her master’s degree by cataloging their library, then she and her mother, Anna, joined fellow Indianians in a group purchase of property in southern California.
There Clara was reunited with her dead husband’s younger brother, Williell, a brilliant, troubled man who had attended Hanover College, taught school, and studied law before graduating from Presbyterian Seminary in Danville, Kentucky. He continued his studies at the San Francisco Theological Seminary and reencountered his sister-in-law while serving as the minister at Santa Monica Presbyterian Church. They were married in December of 1882.5
The Thomsons built a large house on the corner of Columbia and Fair Oaks in Pasadena. Their widowed mothers lived with them, and Clara and Williell became active in the community, circulating antisaloon petitions and helping found Sierra Madre College. Clara read Greek and Latin and taught school, but her immediate focus was on what she called her “four stairsteps”: Henry Lyon Thomson, born in 1885 when Clara was thirty-five, followed by Williell junior in 1888, Frederick Clifton in January of 1890, and Samuel Harrison in 1895. Williell continued to work as a pastor, and also as a surveyor, civil engineer, teacher, and a superintendent of the Pasadena Street Railway Company. He wandered from job to job, never particularly successful at any of them, and it was Clara’s strong will that held
