to be shared with all their city friends began to wane with an infestation of bugs and then the spread of mildew. One night as they were preparing to actually eat the little home-grown bounty that had survived, Norma Talmadge called to invite them to dinner, but Anita declined. “Tonight Frances and I are eating four hundred dollars’ worth of peas.”23
They made the most of the weekend parties along the Gold Coast that F. Scott Fitzgerald would soon immortalize in The Great Gatsby. The misery of the war seemed far away and Frances noticed how few in their circle of friends and acquaintances seemed to have been touched by it or any problems that affected the real world. Prohibition had arrived, but like Attorney General “Palmer’s raids” and talk of unions, it was a minor unpleasantry to be worked around or, better yet, ignored.
As soon as a new speakeasy opened, the passwords were known to all who mattered and the only inconvenience seemed to be that they were now drinking out of teacups instead of glasses.
Serious drinkers arrived at serious solutions. Anita claimed that Charlotte Pickford simply bought an entire liquor store, secreted the inventory in her basement, and padlocked it to keep others in general and son Jack in particular away from her stash. Out on Long Island, delivery trucks arrived with kegs marked “Pickles” and soon whiskey, rum, or champagne would magically be served.24
Anita and Frances were both disciplined writers and they lived together easily, but one of the reasons Anita had pressed Frances into sharing the house was so she would have “a chaperon” for the constant presence of John Emerson. The tiny Anita was always a sucker for a tall man and his claim that he “never had been, nor ever could be, faithful to any one female” made him all the more irresistible. She convinced herself she was “different from all his other girls” and that behind his stoic presence was a great mind.25
Frances did not even pretend to understand the relationship. She thought Anita was a talented “dynamo,” smart and fun to be with, and found John a total dullard with a “constipated brain” who manipulated Anita. Yet Frances was learning to withhold her opinions and she was matron of honor when Anita married John Emerson on Sunday, June 15, 1919, in a garden ceremony at Joe Schenck and Norma Talmadge’s estate. Anita beamed in her long white lace dress, a large hat, and a huge bouquet, all serving to accentuate her tiny stature next to her beloved Emerson, dressed in white flannel pants, a dark blazer, and a jaunty straw hat.26
John and Anita left on a European honeymoon, a wedding gift from Joe Schenck, and Frances happily moved back to the Algonquin. With Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, and Robert Sherwood all working at Vanity Fair only a few doors away, they and their friends who regularly gathered at the hotel at noon were beginning to be called the Round Table. The name was acquired because other diners would point out Mrs. Fiske sitting next to Alexander Woolcott or H. L. Mencken next to George Kaufman and Ruth Hale “at the round table” in the center of the room. It was a casual group at first, but they were united in their seriousness about themselves and their writing.
While Frances and Dorothy Parker enjoyed each other privately, Frances was rarely at the hotel at lunchtime, and even when she was, she hesitated to join the group even for a brief visit. Her writing was of the “sentimental” type they disdained and Frances found their “verbal fencing” more exhausting than exhilarating.27
She was the first to agree that her stories were not up to their literary standards, but the money she was earning was staggering. The $2,000 a week she was receiving from Hearst was augmented by the Palmer Plan of Photoplay Writing when they paid her to endorse their correspondence school. A glamourous picture of Frances was featured in their ads and she was proclaimed the “highest salaried photoplaywright in the industry.”
Frances joined Frank and Bertha Case and other friends of Elsie Janis on May 31 when the Rotterdam brought “Ma” and her daughter home from England to a reception appropriate for a conquering hero. The band played Over There and a huge banner reading “Welcome Home, Elsie Janis” covered the entire side of the tugboat that greeted the ship.
Elsie spent a month being feted and honored throughout New York and was approached by several studios. Her popularity with the troops and the press coverage of her travels gave her a natural drawing power for the screen and she signed a four-picture, $5,000-a-week contract with Lewis Selznick’s elder son, Myron.28
Forming Selznick Picture Corporation was Myron’s way of celebrating his twenty-first birthday as well as getting back at the men he felt had betrayed his father. The senior Selznick had lost a power struggle with Adolph Zukor and been forced out of Select Pictures the year before. Myron had apprenticed with his father and then served as the studio manager for Norma Talmadge; by the time he signed Elsie Janis, he already had Olive Thomas and several other stars under exclusive contracts and was determined to put the name of Selznick back in lights.29
Frances quietly supported the young Selznick and respected him for his intense desire to succeed. At the World studios, she had watched Myron work in the film examining room starting at seven in the morning making five dollars a week and move on to other departments, learning every aspect of the business the hard way. And she sympathized with his father, whom she saw as another “victim of overconfidence or treachery.”30
Frances wrote The Flapper for Olive Thomas and continued to comb the theaters of New York for plays that would be appropriate for Marion Davies to film. With over seventy legitimate theaters, Frances saw a variety of possibilities, but Hearst preferred her to peruse the stories he had already purchased for Cosmopolitan magazine.
She agreed to write Everybody’s Sweetheart for Elsie’s first film for Selznick, but the name was soon changed to A Regular Girl to capitalize on Elsie’s well-known nickname. Frances brought in a new friend, Eddie Goulding, to help write the story, and she shared the screen credit with him. She had met the Englishman through Anita Loos and they both adored the witty young man who had acted and written for the British stage before serving in the war. When Goulding arrived in New York anxious to work in American films, Frances knew Elsie wouldn’t mind if she used A Regular Girl to give him his first break.31
Once the Armistice had been declared, “Kill the Hun” movies were dead at the box office. In fact, almost anything having to do with war was an anathema. When Frances adapted the play Billeted for Billie Burke, it was immediately retitled The Misleading Widow and the publicity was careful to spell out that the “farce comedy, contrary to what might be expected from the title of the original play, is about as far removed from war as can be imagined.”
The studio heads were convinced that romance and laughter were all audiences were interested in. New villains were appearing in shades of red and anti-Bolshevik themes became the rage, but it was films like Don’t Change Your Wife, Choosing a Wife, and Getting Mary Married that were packing the theaters.32
Elsie and Frances shared the frustration that the very real problems confronted by soldiers returning home were not being dealt with or even discussed. Anita Loos and John Emerson’s last Famous Players Lasky film Oh You Women was a satire about men back from war to find women in their jobs and the ads featured one petite woman and another grossly fat one, both dressed as men in suits, complete with false mustaches, giving the eye to a sheepish-looking soldier in uniform. The studio promoted the fact that there was a purpose behind the comedy: “It drives home the point that while it was all very fine indeed for a woman to take a man’s place while he went to war, it is all wrong to consider keeping it when he comes home.”33
Frances and Elsie tried to deliver their message in a story about a girl from high society who is inspired by patriotism to serve as a nurse overseas. When she returns home, she realizes her former life is meaningless and secretly goes to work in a boardinghouse
