Yet for all the wealth of intellectual stimulation and artistic inspiration, Marion’s attention became increasingly focused on her tall, young art teacher. Wesley de Lappe had only recently moved with his parents to San Francisco from Santa Rosa and family pressure to become a serious businessman lessened when he was hired as the art institute’s youngest instructor.
At five foot two with chestnut hair and deep blue eyes, the pretty, accomplished seventeen-year-old Marion had many admirers. Yet Wesley didn’t seem to notice her at all. Determined to catch his attention, Marion selected an outrageous hat covered with huge ostrich feathers for San Francisco’s Easter festivities and gave it full credit for finally turning Wesley de Lappe’s head. Less than two weeks later, on April 18, 1906, she and Wesley were sitting on a park bench, delaying the inevitable return home, when a loud, rumbling sound was heard throughout San Francisco that was to change their lives and their city forever.14
Streets literally opened up, buildings shook and crumbled. Marion and Wesley were petrified, but close enough to her home to reconnect with her family and physical safety. Almost every brick chimney in the city fell or was in danger of dropping onto the masses of people as they fled into the streets, screaming helplessly or wandering in quiet shock. Everyone was clutching someone or something: clothes, family silver, irreplaceable photographs, or jewels. For Marion, it was her ostrich feather Easter hat and Wesley de Lappe.
As devastating as the initial shock had been—later estimated to be 8.3 on the Richter scale—the fires that followed were what devoured the city. Gaslights crashed to the ground and electric wires short-circuited, sparking blazes everywhere. Water hydrants were useless; the underground pipes had been shattered by the quake.
Dynamite blasts vibrated throughout the city as a quarter-mile firebreak was created at Van Ness Avenue. The flames continued for three days and two nights and when they finally burned out, Chinatown, the Barbary Coast, the financial district, and the wooden tenements south of Market were nothing but ashes. More than 1,000 people died, 250 city blocks were devastated, and 300,000 men, women, and children were left homeless. “You have to forget the idea that there was a fire in San Francisco,” W. R. Hearst wrote. “There was a fire OF San Francisco.”15
The impact of the earthquake was not only physical. An atmosphere of equality and community spirit akin to the aftermath of war resulted as tents were pitched in vacant lots and parks and among the ashes of the Nob Hill estates. Debutantes and shopgirls, stockbrokers and beer hall bouncers all lived side by side for months. Children stood in lines several blocks long for free fruit and milk and the Red Cross distributed tins of food. Looters were shot on sight and bottled water became more valuable than gold.
Marion would later say that her family “lost everything” in the earthquake, but while their economic security was gone, their house remained standing. The Mark Hopkins Art Institute was obliterated, as was her father’s drug company and his warehouses. Len Owens had sold his interest in his advertising firm to concentrate on developing Aetna Springs as a summer resort, but now all available building materials were needed in the city and the economic demands of recovery left few with discretionary income for vacationing.16
Her mother was forced to forfeit any remaining hope of sending Marion to an eastern college. With her school and most vestiges of normalcy gone from the city, marriage became the next logical step, a way for her truly to be on her own. She openly enjoyed Wes’s “maulings,” as she called their lovemaking, and soon he was convinced that setting a wedding date was his idea.
In California a girl under eighteen and a boy under twenty-one had to have parental permission to marry. Though Len Owens was furious that Marion would even consider marrying a poor, nineteen-year-old artist—even though Wes had found work drawing for the San Francisco Chronicle—Minnie had been Marion’s age when she married and she resigned herself to her daughter’s determination. On Monday, October 21, 1906, Minnie accompanied Marion, Wes, and his father, Russell, to the temporary county offices in a converted house on Sacramento Street to sign the necessary papers for a marriage license.
Two days later, Marion’s older sister, Maude, recently married to Wilson Bishop, an up-and-coming insurance man, returned home to spend the night with Marion and early the next morning Wes and his sister Amy Belle arrived at the house to pick up Marion and Maude. Unsure of what to wear, Wes had bought four new ties the day before but forgot them all and then lost the ring as well. The girls waited patiently as he ran out to replace them and returned bedecked in his black wool suit, vest, and tie and with a new ring in his pocket, ready, as Marion said, “to be led to the halter.”
She had arranged for them to be married by her father’s former neighbor Reverend Bradford Leavitt, pastor at the first Unitarian Church. Yet as the foursome arrived at the Leavitt house on Jackson just in time for their eleven o’clock appointment, Wes realized that the only money he had left was a twenty-dollar gold piece; he did not want to give Reverend Leavitt more than ten dollars but was too embarrassed to ask for change. So out the door he headed again, down the steps and up the street. Maude ran after him, screaming for him to turn around as there were no stores in that direction. Marion and Amy Belle watched from the porch, laughing and crying at the same time.
The temperature was already in the seventies, and when Wes returned with the change, he was perspiring through his heavy clothes. Reverend Leavitt descended the stairs and tried to make the disheveled group comfortable, instructing Amy Belle and Maude to stand behind Wes and Marion, and proceeded with the brief ceremony in his downstairs parlor.
As he asked, “Wesley, do you take this woman to be your lawful wedded wife,” Marion looked up at Wes and saw what she thought was the “scardest, maddest, and percipitist bridegroom [sic]” she had ever seen and forgot her own whirling emotions for a moment. His forehead covered with sweat, his eyes darting in fear, Wes tried desperately to regain his composure and managed a very faint “Yes, sir.” Marion choked over her words as well. When they came to the moment he was to put the ring on her finger, the perspiration reached his eyes and he blindly grasped her hand.
“Marion . . . Marion, you . . . thee . . . with this wed . . . ring . . . I thee we . . .”
Reverend Leavitt’s smile broke the tension and Marion laughed out loud. Droplets were landing on her hand, but mercifully, the ceremony was over. Looking pale but grinning, Wes went off to work at the Chronicle and Marion, not giving up on all traditions, visited dressmakers to complete her trousseau with a new red suit and a selection of hats. For a honeymoon of sorts, they spent the weekend at a local hotel.17
Marion was selling occasional stories and paintings and Wes’s salary at the Chronicle was small but steady, yet economic realities mandated they live with their families. Four days after the brief ceremony, the newlyweds moved in with Wes’s parents and sisters on C Street in the Richmond district of San Francisco. After several months of restrained good behavior, Marion realized she had exchanged one set of watching eyes for another and, living with his parents, Wes seemed more of a son than a husband. Familiar with the constraints of sharing a roof with her own relatives, the couple moved in with her family.
Frustrated with what she felt were her limitations as a writer and an artist, Marion sought out her old family friend Jack London for advice.
“If you expect to write stories pulsing with real life or put upon canvas compositions that are divinely human, you must go forth and live,” he told her. “Study human nature by rubbing elbows with the people. Go out and work with them, eat with them, dream with them.”
Inspired by the dramatic seriousness of his words, Marion tried her hand at a variety of jobs. She pitted peaches at a local cannery until one slipped loose, hitting the woman working next to her on line. Accused of throwing it on purpose, Marion was given her walking papers
