I told him how clever I thought Miss Pickford was.”
“Mary has an expressive little talent,” Owen responded. “Hardly what one could call cerebral.”
Star or butcher, Marion could not abide any husband’s talking about his wife that way. Controlling herself, she smiled and walked away, but Owen gave her a moment to cool down and followed her to the punch bowl.
“Can’t you women learn to fortify yourselves against the truth, or do we always have to lie to you? Would I have seemed more gallant had I endowed Mary with a greater talent than Sarah Bernhardt?”
As Marion was debating whether to turn away again, he asked her if she would like him to arrange a meeting with Mary. Her anger changed to interest, particularly when he added, “Charlotte Greenwood tells me you do fine portraits. Take some of your work along and maybe you can do one of Mary.”
The party was breaking up and Marion said her good-byes. She was excited at the possibility of meeting Mary Pickford and thought Owen Moore “was a very attractive Lothario, if only he hadn’t made that snide remark about his wife’s talent.”24
Although three years younger than Marion, Mary Pickford was old beyond her years. She had been the family breadwinner since the age of eight, playing in stage roles with stock companies that took her away from her native Toronto and her widowed mother; sister Lottie, and brother Jack for months at a time. She was all of fifteen in the summer of 1907 when she determined to make a career in New York. Sleeping on a friend’s chair and paying the “rent” by shopping and cleaning, she saved every penny she could to send home. Blindly ambitious, she bombarded the preeminent producer David Belasco with letters and photographs of herself and won the role of young Betty in his production of The Warrens of Virginia, written by William de Mille and costarring his younger brother, Cecil.25
It was Belasco who decided that Gladys Smith needed a new stage name and together they reviewed her family tree for one with marquee value. They stopped at her maternal grandfather, Jack Pickford Hennessey, and she proudly wired her mother, “Gladys Smith now Mary Pickford engaged by David Belasco to appear on Broadway this fall.” She never looked back and she was never a child again. As if to underscore their dedication to her future, the rest of the family adopted the name Pickford as well.26
Mary had done little but work since then, and with her mother’s constant guidance, negotiated increases in pay with each new studio and contract. Insulated in her family and films, Mary had little time for friends, excepting the fatherless Gish sisters, with whom the family shared rooms in New York during the off season. But that spring of 1914 when Owen mentioned a woman who was an excellent portrait painter and someone he thought she would like, Mary was willing to make the time. Still, it had to be at the studio so she could cut the interview short if she wanted.
Marion was not about to repeat the mistake she had made when she missed Marie Dressler. As soon as she was summoned, she dropped everything and prepared for her audience, but that morning the Santa Ana winds were blowing hard, making it impossible to carry her portfolio. If she was to be on time, she had to leave her pictures at home.
A young man met Marion at the studio entrance and walked her through the dirt lot until he knocked at the door of a wooden building. A voice called out for them to enter and there in a darkened room stood Mary Pickford editing film with the cutter. She greeted Marion with a smile and a firm handshake and took her into a side room to talk.
Marion’s first reaction to Mary was to sense “a strange watchfulness behind her steadfast gaze.” She was surprised at the vulnerability from someone she had put on a pedestal and she instantly developed a fiercely protective attitude toward Mary that was to be a hallmark of their friendship.27
Their shared sense of ambition united them immediately and although Mary was initially more reticent than Marion, they quickly established a shared sense of failure in their respective marriages as well. They had both married for the first time a few months short of their eighteenth birthday, and while Mary had seen more than most people twice her age, she had lived a very sheltered and disciplined life; nothing had prepared her for the first time Owen Moore put his arm around her. The physical sensations she felt were entirely new to her and she was swept off her feet. Moore was seven years older, known as a man about town and, perhaps most offensive of all to her mother, Charlotte, “a five-dollar-a-day actor.” Yet when he threatened to leave her if she didn’t marry him, they secretly wed in January 1911 and hid the fact from her mother for several months.28
When their relationship was written about in the press, it was all romance, sweetness, and fluff. Reality was a very different picture. Owen and Mary had their own apartment for a while, but Mary had no experience in relationships and, growing up on trains and in boardinghouses, knew even less about domestic skills. And her mother was always there; in their home, at the studio, and even traveling with them. Charlotte would check in to the suite, point to one bedroom, and announce with authority, “You take that room Owen. Mary and I will sleep in here.”
Mary’s star was rising and Owen’s, if not descending, was standing still and his drinking did not help matters. All these factors, combined with different shooting schedules, gave the marriage little chance at all.29
In the fall of 1913, Mary was hospitalized with what some biographers claim were internal injuries incurred when, following the script, she carried a much larger girl from a burning schoolhouse. Mary herself would later refer to her condition as a ruptured appendix and the November issue of Photoplay reported that she was “convalescing rapidly” from “a serious attack of appendicitis.” But others ascertained that Mary was suffering from the afteraffects of an abortion performed in a New York hospital. Whatever the actual cause for her hospitalization, Mary was never able to have children.30
By January of 1914, Mary was well enough to travel to California and resume filming. The press reported that “poor ‘Little Mary’ still looks awfully tiny and thin,” but by the next month they were “wishing that ‘Little Mary’s’ health will continue to improve and that no more horrid operations will have to be performed or horrid medicines taken,” a stiletto jab if she had had an abortion.31
She looked wonderful to Marion when they first met only a few months later and she was relieved that Mary was not at all concerned that she had been unable to bring her portfolio. After over an hour of comfortable conversation, Mary assured her there would be plenty of time for portrait painting when she returned from New York in the fall. As Marion left the studio, the young man at the gate commented on his amazement that “Miss Pickford spent so much time” with her and she felt exhilarated.
In a short few months, Marion had seen Marie Dressler again, been to Inceville, and met Mary Pickford. She was convinced fate was playing a hand and was more determined than ever to find work in “the movies.” Marie had offered to help, but she was in New York and Marion’s mind raced to think of who else would have suggestions. Adela Rogers would know.
Only the week before she had seen Adela at the Alexandria Hotel lunching with Lois Weber. While there were a good dozen women directors working in Los Angeles, Lois Weber at the age of thirty-two was the best known, most respected, and highest paid; it had just been announced that she had signed a $50,000-a-year contract. As Marion left the hotel, she noticed Adela waving, but not wanting to interrupt, she smiled and walked out the door.32
The next day, Adela told her Lois Weber had wanted to meet her. “She’s always on the look out for new faces and you’re the refined type that appeals to her.” Marion laughed out loud at the thought, but what days before had seemed like a ludicrous idea now struck her as a logical possibility, and she asked Adela to set up an appointment with the director.33
Lois
