members of the company were deferential to Morosco, but after reading the play, Marion walked right up to him and said earnestly, “Surely you aren’t going to put on an old wheeze like Peg o’ My Heart. Not after doing Shaw and Ibsen. It’s ‘Cinderella right out of the Dog Pound.’ ”
Morosco warned Marion that it was a big success in New York and added, “Don’t you dare make any criticism about it to Miss Taylor. The play was written by her new husband.” Laurette Taylor took the role of the young ingenue to heart and Marion’s job was to paint the essence of the character and, she reminded herself, not the lines of age that were already showing on the still beautiful actress who posed in front of her.6
Peg o’ My Heart was a smash, playing for a over a year, and with his profits, Morosco expanded his empire by importing the New York actress Kitty Gordon, nationally proclaimed as having “the most beautiful back in America.”
Marion’s painting conspicuously featured Kitty’s famous asset, posing her glancing over her dazzling shoulders and down her bare back in a gown ending in a V at the waist. Morosco loved it, but when the lithographs went up, they were almost instantly vandalized. Letters protesting the poster poured into the newspapers and flyers were distributed in front of the theater.
We must protect our innocent little children from seeing such obscene pictures of half-nude women. And we must keep them away from the evil influence of the nickelodeons and these lawless people who have forced themselves upon our beautiful city to make what they call movies. Only if we all unite can we drive them out.
It was signed “Conscientious Citizens.”7
The leaflets piqued Marion’s curiosity and she goaded a Morosco actor, Jimmy Gleason, into attending a “Conscientious Citizens” meeting with her. They were greeted by a “bilious little man” announcing they were already a third of the way to their goal of 10,000 signatures on petitions “to rid our city of these hoodlums.” He introduced “the groups that are working the hardest to bring about this emancipation,” and hotel owners and restauranteurs rose to promise not to allow anyone connected with the movies into their premises.
A clubwoman explained why “legitimate” actors from the theater were different from these new hordes that cursed the city: “Stage folks keep their actions hidden behind closed doors, while those ‘flicker people,’ with their painted faces, perform shamelessly right out in the open.”8
Marion and Jimmy were so offended by the small-mindedness of the gathering, they dubbed them “The Constipated Citizens,” yet they too had seen cameras, men with megaphones, and costumed actors all over town. Fires or police chases of any kind were fair game to be used as backdrops, as were horse races, sporting events, and parades. The participants were referred to as “movies” and Agnes de Mille remembered, “They were really outcasts. The Keystone cops would take over a street and do what they had to do before the real police arrived. It was fun, but it was socially unacceptable. I knew what racial discrimination was because I was a ‘movie.’ ”9
Even when The Los Angeles Times editorialized about the economic benefits of the new business, they acknowledged the problem: “The motion picture people may be something of a pest, but their value to the community as national and international advertisers is inestimable.”10
Robert’s innate sense of respectability made him side with the Conscientious Citizens and Marion would later recall her second husband as being “years older,” even though he was only three years her senior. He spent his days in a conservative business milieu and the “differences in our social instincts” became all the more apparent. He “felt uncomfortable with my artist and writer friends and wanted us to live a formal mid-Victorian existence.”11
What had once looked liberating from the position of the working wife of a poor artist now became confining. Marion was coming to terms with the fact she would never be happy as a society wife and that she worked because she wanted to, yet she managed to postpone most immediate conflicts with Robert because they spent so little time together. He was busy working and traveling and when Marion wasn’t painting or at the theater, she took to studying the history of the region.
One of her favorite weekend haunts was the historic plaza designed 150 years earlier by the original Franciscan Mission settlement for the founding population of thirty-two people. The narrow cobbled streets that led from the plaza were sheltered by pepper trees and oleanders and on Sundays, devout Catholics and tourists mixed with the Mexican families who lived in the nearby adobes.12
One Sunday afternoon in early 1914, Marion looked up from the bench where she sat sketching Mexican children at play to see a tall, hefty woman in a broad-brimmed hat and an unflattering, boldly printed dress walking out of one of the small shops, carrying a bag of popcorn. Marion watched as she tossed the popcorn to the pigeons and listened as the woman conversed with the birds, ordering them not to be so greedy.
Then Marion’s heart gave a little leap as she realized the woman was Marie Dressler. Instinctively, she stood up, but immediately sat back down, sure that the famous actress would not remember “a silly young reporter.” Marion started to make a quick sketch, but Marie headed toward her as she emptied the popcorn bag onto the ground.
“I’m not really off my trolley,” she said, glancing up from under her hat at Marion, the only person sitting nearby. “I like birds. I talk to them. I have an old parrot, a regular . . .”
As Marion stealthily slipped the drawing back into the pad, Marie stopped short. “Say, aren’t you the girl who interviewed me in San Francisco four or five years ago?”
Marion rose again as she said, “Yes, Miss Dressler, but I didn’t dream you’d remember me.”
“I’m not the forgetting type. I’ve often wondered what became of you. Hate to lose track of anybody I take a fancy to.”
Relaxing Marion with her easy charm, Marie reached out her hand and suggested they go into “one of these little Mexican joints and have a tamale.”
Marion’s familiarity with the area gave her the confidence to suggest Señora Martinez’s El Pajaro restaurant around the corner. Four tables filled the small adobe dining room, and Marie was impressed when Marion was welcomed like family by the owner and ordered for both of them in Spanish. The feeling of comfortable informality quickly fell over the two women just as it had that night long ago in San Francisco.13
Marion talked about her work for Morosco and her second husband and Marie said she too had left an early unhappy marriage and spoke of her childhood in Cobourg, Canada. She was born Leila Maria Koerber and by the time she was ten, she was larger than her fifteen-year-old sister and so responsible she considered herself as “born older.” Marie adored her “frail little mother,” who, “gentle as she was, had courage enough to stand between me and my father. He was a tyrannical German musician who worshipped beauty and couldn’t forgive me for being such a mudhen.”14
Marie was in Los Angeles to film Tillie’s Punctured Romance for Mack Sennett at his Keystone studio in Edendale, and her supporting players were Mabel Normand, a girl “with a complexion that makes you think of gardenias,” and a new rising star, Charlie Chaplin. The English comic had just signed with Keystone after being discovered as he toured America with Fred Karno’s burlesque troop.
Marie had first met Mack Sennett when she was an established comedienne and he, working in a Connecticut iron foundry, sought her advice on how to break into show business. With her help he became an actor for David Wark Griffith, and rumor had it that his mentor was now
