the remarkable sum of $2,500 a week to create his first six-reel comedy.15
Marie entranced Marion with tales of making movies, comparing the process to “sitting in the middle of a cement mixer.” She thought a pretty girl had an easier time of it and asked if she had considered “going into the movies?”
“Do they use artists?”
“I mean to play in them. Be an actress. You’ve got the looks.” Marion laughed at the thought, claiming she couldn’t act “even if Svengali hypnotized me,” but admitted she would love to do more portraits of the actors.
“Come on out to the studio anytime and ask for me. I’ll be happy to tote you around.”
The sun was setting over the plaza as they left the restaurant, basking in the warmth of an easy friendship. Marie reminded her of what she had said in San Francisco years before. This time, Marion was secure in the knowledge that the phrase “I’ll see you again” was a fact, not just a hope.
“I’ll be repeating that promise if you come to the studio in about a week; our company will be in full swing by then and I’ll introduce you to Chaplin.”16
But weeks passed before Marion was free to venture out to Edendale. Because painting for Morosco was intermittent, she had arranged to be on call for an advertising firm and they suddenly were in need of several commercial layouts with immediate deadlines. When she finally arrived at the Sennett studio and asked for Miss Dressler, the guard informed her “Punctured is in the can. She left for New York yesterday.”
Until she was turned away, Marion had not realized how much she was looking forward to being on the lot, if only for an afternoon. Just being at the gates of the studio electrified her with excitement. Then, within days of this disappointment, Oliver Morosco told her that because the cost of lithographing had recently tripled, he could not rationalize keeping her on salary.17
At twenty-five, Marion had already developed the philosophy to “take failure with my chin up and success, when it comes, in stride.” She took this news as a minor setback and leased a fourth-floor studio at 315 Broadway, sharing the rent with fellow illustrator Hilda Hasse. Marion turned to working full-time for advertising men, whom she found “deadly serious and content in their narrow world,” and tried to lace her layouts selling bunion removers and pickles with charm and sex appeal. In her boredom, her dissatisfaction with Robert increased, but she refused to entertain the thought of returning to San Francisco; her ambition remained intact and she was confident that Los Angeles was where she belonged.18
Marion spent many of her evenings with the woman who was becoming her best friend in Los Angeles, Adela Rogers. They had first met in San Francisco shortly after the earthquake, when the teenage Adela came to town with her father, one of the country’s most famous defense attorneys.
Adela’s parents separated when she was still a child and with the exception of a few months at the Convent of Notre Dame in Santa Clara and traveling in Europe with her aunt and uncle, Adela had been raised and educated by tutors, her father, and her grandparents. She disdained her mother and worshipped her father, who involved her in his cases and took her with him in his travels. Adela adored San Francisco and would always claim she was from there because “it sounded much more glamorous and literary” than Los Angeles.19
Being Earl Rogers’s daughter was a role Adela took seriously. In fact, she always assumed she would be a lawyer, but a brief foray into acting led her astray as far as Earl was concerned and he introduced her to William Randolph Hearst. The publisher hired her at the age of eighteen as a cub reporter for his Los Angeles Herald Examiner, where she thrived, using her natural curiosity as well as the investigative techniques and storytelling abilities she had learned at her father’s knee.
Marion had been raised to think independently and to be relatively self-sufficient, but she paled in comparison to Adela. Marion was several years older and she knew Adela well enough to see her insecurities, but Adela conducted herself with such an aura of sureness that she was always the one in charge. With opinions on absolutely everything, she was a close friend and an authority figure at the same time. Yet she put Marion on a bit of a pedestal as well. She had been impressed and just a little threatened when Earl Rogers pronounced upon meeting Marion for the first time, “That girl has genius. She’ll do something.”20
The two women were occasionally joined by the stars Adela met through reporting and the Keystone comedienne Mabel Normand became a favorite companion. They ventured out to the Vernon Country Club, the closest thing to the Barbary Coast south of the Tahatchapis, where Adela would drink crème de menthe, Marion a weak scotch, and Mabel whiskey “with apricot brandy added to kill the taste.” They danced until all hours and then crawled back into town, sometimes going straight to work or catching a quick nap at Mabel’s apartment at Seventh and Figueroa.21
Adela was also spending time with the Herald Examiner’s tall, good-looking copy editor Ike St. Johns, but many nights she, Marion, and an eclectic group of friends gathered at Ivy’s, Al Levy’s at Third and Main, or the Ship Café down on the Venice pier. The regulars included Eric von Stroheim, a young man who claimed to have his fortune tied up in Europe so “he lived meagerly off what he could borrow from the rest of us.” Marion tolerated him because he was a friend of Adela’s and found “his stories amusing, his lies preposterous and he entertained us, even though we didn’t think he had a chance to succeed.”
They also enjoyed the company of Sessue Hayakawa and Tsuru Aoki, whom Marion had known and liked at St. Margaret’s Hall. The couple were engaged to be married and determined to be successful actors, so when Tsuru was cast in The Geisha along with their friend Frank Borzage, one of the few actors they knew who worked regularly, Adela convinced him to put in a word for Sessue with the director Thomas Ince.22
Marion and Adela went together to watch The Geisha being filmed one afternoon at “Inceville,” the massive strip of land off Sunset bordering on the Pacific Ocean where film could be shot on the beach and in the mountains on the same day. Adela was “a walkie-talkie encyclopedia of intellectual and casual information” on the people and the techniques they were using, and Marion soaked it all in.
She stayed in touch with her friends from the Morosco Theater, missing the regular contact with the personalities, the gossip, and the warring factions, all in equal measure. Few of the actors, excepting Charlotte Greenwood and Bob Leonard, who had just “deserted” to act and direct at Universal, expressed any desire or even willingness to perform in front of the camera. Enticing as the money was, flickers were still looked down on by everyone who considered themselves serious actors. Jimmy Gleason avoided the temptation by writing a play that was to be produced in New York, and a farewell gathering was quickly arranged.
Among the familiar faces at Jimmy’s party were several “movies” and Marion was introduced to Owen Moore. She knew he and his older brothers, Matt and Tom, had been acting since their teens and that Owen was married to Mary Pickford, known as the “girl with the golden curls.”
Variety had started reporting on motion pictures as early as 1907 and newspapers created sections for reviews soon after. But the boom in moviegoing had resulted in new magazines such as Moving Picture World and Photoplay, a lavishly colored monthly selling for fifteen cents a copy. With features like “Who’s Who in the Photoplays,” word quickly spread that the favorite known as “Goldilocks” or “Little Mary” had a full name; it was Mary Pickford and Frances had already noticed “the quality of her films were above the rest.”23
A slight man about five feet ten inches, with deep blue eyes and dark hair slicked straight back, Owen struck Marion as almost too handsome.
