it difficult to articulate the war’s devastation.
“What may come as an aftermath of all I saw and experienced is more than I can say right now, but when I think of all the scenes I witnessed, I realize how helpless I am, or would be, in attempting to include any of it in a scenario.”1
She was anxious to put the war behind her, catching up with old friends like Anita Loos and meeting new ones like the Vanity Fair drama critic Dorothy Parker. She also ran into Elda Furry, or Hedda Hopper, as she was now calling herself, and they laughed about their hostile meeting years before during the filming of The Battle of Hearts. Several friends including Elsie Janis had told them both separately how much they would enjoy each other and they soon admitted their friends knew better than they did.
Hedda was a natural storyteller and she laughed as easily at herself as she did at others. She amused Frances with tales of her Quaker girlhood outside Altoona, Pennsylvania, and her marriage to the much older Broadway star De Wolf Hopper. She was “Wolfie’s” fifth wife and he kept calling her by their names: Ella, Ida, Edna, or Nella. The artist Neysa McMein suggested she see her numerologist, and by combining dates and numbers, the seer arrived at the name Hedda. Wolfie was less than enthusiastic, but he never called her by the wrong name again.2
Hedda was thirty-four, the mother of a four-year-old son, and was already starting to drop several years from her age. Frances could be cynical while Hedda crossed the line into judgmental, but they laughed without inhibition and Frances enjoyed Hedda’s rapier wit and even tolerated her constant flow of unsolicited advice. She had found a new friend who made her, even at her most honest, sound demure.3
After three weeks of vacationing in New York, Frances took the train west, stopping in Chicago to interview the heads of the several war relief organizations for her film. American Women in the War was soon released to exhibitors as a serial in fifteen reels.4
Frances’s first order of business after checking into the Hollywood Hotel was to see Mary. They had written often, but six months was a long time between face-to-face conversations, especially for best friends used to seeing each other every day.
Mary’s affair with Doug Fairbanks had intensified and rumors were rampant. While they were still trying to keep their relationship a secret, Owen Moore knew exactly what was happening. Already resentful of what he saw as Doug’s “instant stardom,” Owen’s drinking and mood swings escalated to the point that he threatened to kill both Mary and “that climbing monkey.” Fairbanks cavalierly told his director Allan Dwan, “Your friend Owen Moore says he’s going to shoot me, if he’s sober enough to point the gun,” but he took the threat seriously enough to go to Arizona for a month to make A Modem Musketeer and even looked into the possibility of going to South America to make a film or two.5
While he knew his own marriage was a sham, Doug so hated confrontations that he kept the telegraph wires busy with cables to Beth professing his love and denying any problems. She had remained blind to the affair; Doug’s busy schedule and her preference for New York over California made her fairly easy to manipulate, yet slowly her suspicions grew. During one of her California visits, Doug took off with Mary, thinking Beth was lunching with Hedda Hopper. Their friendship had developed when both their husbands were on Broadway and Beth had helped Hedda find a house when the Hoppers arrived in Hollywood. The two women often took walks together and this afternoon they wandered past Doug’s brother’s bungalow. The puritanical Hedda had seen Mary and Doug sneak into the house for assignations before and while she would never approve of such affairs, she wasn’t going to be the one to tell Beth. To avoid any possible encounters, Hedda told her the canyon was infested with rattlesnakes and rerouted their walks from then on.6
Doug feared facing the public scrutiny that would result from a divorce, but in his growing irritation at not having everything the way he wanted it, he rhetorically asked friends, “Why shouldn’t I divorce? Caesar did it. Napoleon did it.”7
Even Beth was already seeing someone else, an old friend from her debutante days, the Pittsburgh stockbroker James Evans. And when she finally went public and announced her separation from Fairbanks, Beth told some reporters that she suspected Mary Pickford as “the other woman.” Yet while the divorce was covered avidly by the press, Mary’s name was never printed and when asked, she emphatically claimed her relationship with “Mr. Fairbanks” was a purely professional one.
Mary had sent Frances the newspaper clipping when Beth was granted an interlocutory decree of divorce in November of 1918. The process itself was relatively civilized, with Doug agreeing to a one-time settlement of all his savings. His brother John took the train across the country to deliver a suitcase with half a million dollars in cash and securities to Beth and she in turn named “an unknown woman” as the cause of the divorce.8
Beth Fairbanks made the next move by marrying Jim Evans just as Mary entered into a very public professional relationship with Doug, Charlie Chaplin, and D. W. Griffith when they formed their own production company.9
The liberty bond tours had given Doug, Mary, and Charlie the opportunity to ask each other the obvious question: Why were they splitting profits with their producers? After all, people came to the movies to see them, not Zukor or Lasky. Yet their complaints and dreams might have remained just that if the trades had not reported in January of 1919 rumors of a merger between the two major distributors, Paramount and First National. Mary had thrived on playing one studio off against another to increase her income with each new contract and if such a merger occurred, she knew it would “clamp the lid on the salaries.”10
Chaplin always claimed that their initial public meetings and the press conference he held with Mary, Doug, and D. W. Griffith was as much a bluff to prevent the merger as anything, but the idea took on a life of its own and in the spring of 1919, they were formally signing the papers of their new corporation.
They called themselves United Artists, but the trades called it a “rebellion against established producing and distributing arrangements.” The four insisted their actions were “for the protection of their interests,” William McAdoo, the former secretary of the Treasury whom Doug had befriended on the bond tours, was named their general counsel, adding an air of prestige from outside the industry. McAdoo knew little about making pictures, but in these heady times, Doug, Mary, Charlie, and the Master himself represented the most successful and experienced combine imaginable.11
Busy with meetings and publicity, Mary still made time to shift her attention to Frances when she suffered a relapse of the flu and sent her doctor to the Hollywood Hotel to supervise Frances’s recovery. Flowers, bed jackets, and visitors arrived by the dozens and soon she was sufficiently recuperated to head north to San Francisco. She spent several days visiting her family and the Examiner covered her visit with a page one story, headlining her as “a war heroine.”12
Frances’s contract with Famous Players had been in abeyance while she was overseas, and because Mary was no longer at the studio, Frances could have challenged the arrangement. Yet if there was any question that they expected her to return, it was answered by the presence of their publicity man at the pier upon her arrival in New York. Not knowing when Fred would be home, Frances was comfortable working on a film-by-film basis and she wrote a scenario for Billie Burke and adapted four Anne of Green Gables books into one script for Mary Miles Minter, the new star Famous Players hoped would challenge the departing Mary Pickford.13
Mary asked Frances to write for her once United Artists started producing, but that was still at least six months in the future. Fred’s letters told her he was helping organize the Interallied Games in Paris over the summer and he would not be home until September at the earliest. While he was frustrated with the delay, the games were second in importance only to the Olympics
