world loves a lover.” Overall she was encouraging, and Mary thanked her for coming and excused herself. As soon as they were alone, Frances explained how difficult it was for Mary “trying to make an unalterable decision that might radically change her whole way of living.” In addition to everything else, her adored brother, Jack, didn’t approve of Douglas; he thought he was a charlatan trying to buy his own importance through his association with Mary. Frances and Adela both found Jack charming, yet also knew that was exactly the way many saw his relationship with his sister.
Adela asked Frances about what she thought: “Do you understand why she’s in love with him?”
Frances had long stopped trying to explain it to herself or anyone else and shrugged. “I don’t understand why I’m in love with Fred Thomson.”11
Mary made her decision. To the plea that she was “America’s sweetheart,” she declared, “I only want to be one man’s sweetheart.” She was willing to risk it all for what she saw as her one chance at happiness and once the decision was made, Charlotte and their attorney Cap O’Brien started making the necessary arrangements to make the divorce a reality.12
First, a deal was made with Owen to buy his cooperation. Frances remembered that his price was $100,000, but that seems low considering Mary’s wealth. Whatever the actual settlement, Moore sped up the process by conveniently arriving in Minden, Nevada, with his attorney after Mary and Charlotte had been in the state for only two weeks. He publicly claimed that he was scouting film locations, but his presence allowed him to be served with papers so Mary could go to court the next day. Nevada’s divorce laws were already liberal, but they required a three-month residency. Because she swore she was “seeking a quiet place to live” permanently, the time restriction was waived by the seemingly starstruck judge, who granted Mary an immediate divorce on grounds of desertion.
The newspapers painted a sympathetic picture of Mary weeping as she told sordid tales of her husband’s drinking. The reports emphasized that the couple had long been separated and the only reason the divorce came as a surprise was “because of her religious faith.” Frances and Adela spread the word that Owen had asked for a large financial settlement and Mary was portrayed as a woman who had suffered beyond any normal standards of endurance.
As soon as the hearing was over, the thought of a “permanent residence” was forgotten and Mary and Charlotte returned to Los Angeles. Three weeks later, Mary and Doug were quietly married at his house, surrounded only by her family and a few of his closest friends. Adela had been right about the world’s loving lovers; the news was heralded on the front page of newspapers across the country as the closest thing to a formal coronation of the reigning king and queen of the movies.13
When Charlotte and Mary left for Nevada, Frances and Fred had returned to New York, where they subleased a spacious apartment from the composer and pianist Sergei Rachmaninoff, hoping that by the time Frances’s work for Hearst was completed, Doug and Mary could join them for a European honeymoon.14
Frances immediately went to work on the first scenario that had genuinely excited her since her earliest days with Mary. From the outset, the sentimental tale of a Jewish mother’s love and sacrifice for her son set in New York’s Lower East Side was not the type of story William Randolph Hearst considered appropriate for the movies. Still, he had faith in Frances and when she was so passionate about the subject, he gave her a reluctant go-ahead to adapt Fannie Hurst’s Humoresque.
Frances and Fannie became friends and though the literary types at the Algonquin called her a “sob sister,” Frances respected the writer for her prolific output, her personal determination, and her independent outlook on life. Only a few years older than Frances, Fannie was just moving in with her husband of five years, the pianist Jacques Danielson. Her parents had disapproved of the marriage, but the real reason she had kept it a secret from all but their closest friends was because she was confident that keeping the relationship concealed and maintaining separate residences would help preserve their professional independence. The marriage was a happy and successful one by all accounts and Fannie, a supporter of the Lucy Stone League, kept her own name even after giving up her apartment. She laughingly claimed that she began collecting rejection slips at the age of fourteen and had amassed quite a pile before publishing her first national story when she was twenty-one. Now thirty-five, she was making more money than Somerset Maugham or Edna Ferber with her popular short stories.15
Fannie took Frances to see the Russian-born Vera Gordon at the Yiddish theater to encourage casting her as the mother in Humoresque. Frances agreed, but in a bow to the need for star appeal, Alma Rubens was cast as the girl the son falls in love with and was billed above Vera Gordon in the publicity.16
Frances had another new ally in Frank Borzage, who she had known and liked since meeting him with Adela at Inceville. Now thirty years old, the good-looking Borzage had left a promising acting career to establish himself as a talented director at Triangle before being hired by Cosmopolitan. They used hidden cameras to capture the density and grit of the Lower East Side community and that footage opened and was interwoven throughout the film. Joseph Urban designed stylistic interiors for the studio shots and Frances and Borzage grew more excited each day over what they called “our story.” Still, Adolph Zukor questioned Frances’s judgment: “If you and Fannie Hurst are so determined to make the Jews appear sympathetic, why don’t you choose a story about the Rothschilds or men as distinguished as they?”17
Zukor and Hearst insisted on a happy ending and while Frances did not initially resist their demand, she was very concerned when Fannie Hurst saw the first rough cut of Humoresque and was “indignant.” She wanted her name taken off the credits because she had ended her short story with the young man going off to war, but Frances’s version had him returning to his mother and his sweetheart and recovering from his injuries to play his violin again.
Frances valued Fannie’s friendship and it was important to her that she understand movie audiences’ need for “optimism and hope.” Character development took on a different dimension on the screen. To establish Alma Rubens’s innate kindness, Frances created a few moments for her character as a child gently holding and burying a dead kitten. She would later say she was embarrassed by the blatant pathos of the scene, but it effectively established Alma’s sensitivity and set the tone for her attitude and actions throughout the film.
To her credit, Fannie Hurst took up studying motion pictures and came to not only agree with Frances but to encourage her to adapt other of her works into films, using “the skeleton of those stories in new garb especially designed for the screen.”18
Even though more and more studios were flourishing year-round in Los Angeles, New York and New Jersey were still major centers of activity. Joe Schenck was making his films with the Talmadge sisters on East 48th Street, Hearst was operating Cosmopolitan out of a refurbished casino on the Harlem River and after becoming a partner in United Artists, D. W. Griffith decided to build his own studio in rural Mamaroneck, New York.
Mary Pickford’s only other close woman friend was Lillian Gish and she and Frances had become friends as well. Lillian had risen to fame as a heartbreakingly frail waif in films like Broken Blossoms, but Frances knew her to be “as fragile as a steel rod.” Lillian was much more personally secure than Mary and Frances admired her discipline and determination.19
Unlike other stars who worked with Griffith for a year or two and then left for higher salaries, Lillian had stayed with “the master” for almost a decade and moved with his company to Mamaroneck. When the director left for Florida to film exteriors for The Love Flower he put her in charge of the workmen building his studio. Telling her “You know as much about making pictures as I do,” he gave her free rein to direct a film starring her sister Dorothy. Believing in Dorothy’s talent as much as her own, Lillian
