and her questions about what she was doing.26
San Francisco was almost completely rebuilt and Marion agreed with the visiting Englishwoman Beatrice Webb, who called it a “veritable paradise” for anyone “who wishes to live unto himself without any pressure of law, custom or public opinion.” Marion had already seen and accomplished a great deal and enjoyed her reputation as “The Wild Rose of Telegraph Hill” with her artist friends, who valued talent before commerce, but at the age of twenty-two she felt the need to escape. Escape from what or to where, she wasn’t sure.27
Then along came a man offering to make the decisions for her. Robert Dickson Pike was a Stanford graduate, a member of the Bohemian Club, and a rising star at his father’s fast-growing steel firm. In many ways, he was the antithesis of what Marion had been seeking for the past five years, yet Robert represented a level of economic security and social acceptance that was very tempting. The deciding factor for Marion was that her father and Robert’s traveled in the same circles and her engagement garnered Len’s approval like nothing she had accomplished before. And in place of her self-doubts and the often trying challenge of living on her own, Robert told her she was talented and beautiful and made it all seem so easy.28
As Robert Pike’s fiancée, Marion officially entered the realm of the society women Arnold Genthe regularly photographed and it was one of his pictures of her, looking out from under a broad-brimmed hat, that appeared as her engagement picture on page one of the San Francisco Call.
Marion was labeled a “philosopher, artist and society girl—to say nothing of being pretty” who had “decided between the bountiful life of a comfortable wife and the leanness that often attends the struggles of the ambitious.” While the article pointed out she had “achieved more than ordinary success” as an artist and “received flattering offers from the east,” Marion claimed, “All of my ambitions are laid aside. This, I hold, is substantial proof that I am truly and unreasonably in love.”29
With her final divorce papers signed the week before, Marion’s and Robert’s families and a few friends gathered at six o’clock on Tuesday evening, November 14, 1911, at the Swedenborgian Church, where once again Reverend Leavitt, under more formal circumstances, performed the marriage ceremony. A reception and dinner followed at the Pikes’ luxurious apartments at the Fairmont Hotel.
When Marion and Robert became engaged, they intended to spend their honeymoon abroad and live in New York, which, as the papers pointed out, “is so convenient to the capitals and art centers of Europe.” But by the time of the wedding, their plans had changed. Business at C. W. Pike’s was booming and Charles Pike needed his eldest son in Los Angeles to open a branch office. Charles had assured the East Coast steel and iron companies his firm represented of his ability to sell their products throughout California and Robert promised Marion that after a year or two at most in Los Angeles, they would move permanently to Paris, where she could study art at the Sorbonne.30
It seemed like a reasonable compromise at the time.
Chapter 2
When Robert and Marion moved into their new home at 2600 Wilshire Boulevard in January of 1912, she stayed busy organizing the house while he opened C. W. Pike’s Los Angeles office. The demands of building his father’s business kept Robert downtown all day and into the night, and Marion failed to find domestic life particularly satisfying. It had been difficult enough to play the role of society matron in San Francisco where at least there was a society. This Los Angeles was another situation entirely.
Los Angeles in 1912 was a sprawling flatland stretching between the ocean and the mountains. Within a thirty-five-mile radius, there were forty incorporated towns, and it was close to impossible to know where one ended and another began. While the southern California land boom of the 1880s had not brought the number of people who swarmed northern California in the Gold Rush, it had induced a variety of characters to seek out the sun and a new life. Families determined to create their own little utopias bought several hundred or thousands of acres at a time, primarily from the Spanish land grants that still dominated the area, infusing the new communities with their Midwestern values.
Pueblos, acres of orange groves, a few hotels, schools, churches, homes, and clusters of businesses were indiscriminately interspersed with lean-to refineries and thousands of wells, the result of the discovery of oil twenty years earlier. The region was tied together by a combination of paved and dirt roads and the Pacific Electric Company’s Red Car line, with tracks running from San Fernando down to Newport Beach and from Riverside out to the Pacific Ocean. To fill her hours and satisfy her natural curiosity, Marion rode the Red Car, sitting alongside the tourists, workers, and cargo that depended on it as the only reasonable form of transportation.1
A new and steady outlet for Marion’s creativity was provided by the Los Angeles–based producer and theater owner Oliver Morosco. He had gone north to “raid his enemy’s territory” in search of actors, costume designers, and artists, and Marion had been recommended by her friend Waldemar Young, a reporter and grandson of Brigham Young who wrote the “Bits of Color Around the Town” column for the San Francisco Chronicle.2
Morosco looked up Marion upon his return and scanned her portraits of Jack London, boxers Joe Gans and “Gentleman Jim” Corbett, Nob Hill debutantes, and local poets.
“This is the kind of stuff I’m looking for,” he told her. “They catch the personalities.” He offered her the position of personal poster artist for his theater and promised that while “The job may not keep you busy all the time, I’ll help you find plenty of work. We’ve got a booming city if those damned movie outfits seeping in there don’t ruin it.”
When she gave him a questioning look, he explained there were “gangs” all over town “making what we used to call flickers,” adding that the more respectable citizens wanted to run them out of town.3
Los Angeles had first been introduced to the “screen machine” in 1896 when the lights were dimmed at the Orpheum and the image of a life-sized Anna Belle Sun danced for a few precious moments, projected onto a large white sheet. Since then, the technology had advanced considerably. Marion had been to the nickelodeons in San Francisco and watched the ten- to fifteen-minute “one reelers” shown between vaudeville acts. She found “the moving pictures” simple and awkward compared to live theater, yet she enjoyed the antics of a little blond girl known as “Goldilocks” and saw nothing at all offensive.4
Anything different was intriguing to Marion and when she went in search of a new home closer to Robert’s office and the Morosco Theater on South Broadway, she quickly came face-to-face with what she considered shocking provinciality. There were plenty of vacancy signs, but the small print often read “No dogs or actors allowed” or “No jews, actors or dogs.” The bigotry appalled her and her resentment was compounded as she faced a barrage of questions at each door: “Do you live alone? Can you pay a month in advance? Are you in the flicks?”
“No, I am an artist,” stated Marion proudly, but the distinction was not so clear to the inquiring proprietors. After several defeats, Marion rented a furnished home by telling the landlord her husband was a businessman and she was a seamstress; the easel she was moving in was to stretch and measure material.5
Yet if she found her new fellow townsfolk boorish, she was immediately comfortable at the theater. Oliver Morosco described his stock company as “one big happy family,” and she quickly became friends with fellow San Franciscans Lewis Stone and Bert Lytell and a sweet, husky boy who looked more like a college football tackle than a rising star, Robert Z. Leonard. She adored the tall comedienne Charlotte
