Without Lying Down. Cari Beauchamp
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who intended to go to Princeton but picked Harvard instead, a grinning optimist, and a one-man band of moviemaking, facing death-defying feats with a constant smile.19
Frances knew the real Fairbanks too well to have any illusions about George Creel and she arrived at his office to find a short man in his early forties, dressed in flashy clothes and clearly very full of himself. His opening comments reflected his amazement at her attractiveness and youth. He had expected a much older woman since he knew her only by reputation, from letters of recommendations, and from her résumé, which emphasized her years as head of a scenario department, Mary Pickford’s writer, and her experience as a reporter and artist.
Creel told her she was pretty enough to be an actress like his wife, Blanche Bates, who had just made her screen debut in The Border Legion with Hobart Bosworth. His wife had come from the New York stage and he regaled Frances with stories aimed to impress her, but failed miserably.20
She tried to keep her irritation to herself until Joseph Tumulty, the president’s personal secretary, joined the meeting. Although he clearly “had an eye for the ladies,” Tumulty took her seriously and talked about the assignment. Still he told her he hesitated to approve her appointment because it was dangerous at the front and women of experience and substance, such as Mary Roberts Rinehart, were needed to serve in these positions.
Frances informed him that she was a friend of Mary Roberts Rinehart; if Mrs. Rinehart personally recommended her, would he reconsider and sign her commission? Tumulty reappraised the young woman, made note of “the resolve behind her eyes,” and concluded that she was “a rare, rare person, possessing a divine flame.” He assured Frances that he would look upon her appointment favorably with such an endorsement.21
Mary Roberts Rinehart’s husband was stationed as an army physician just outside Washington and Mary happened to be in town visiting him when she and Frances literally ran into each other at the White House. Mary had trained as a nurse before taking up writing and she wanted to return to France in that capacity. Even though she reached 2 million people through her articles in the Saturday Evening Post, she craved the tangible feeling of accomplishment that nursing the wounded brought and she was in the process of trying to cut through the red tape that forbade a woman with two sons serving overseas to go over herself.
Rinehart was enthusiastic about Frances’s being a correspondent and agreed to speak to Tumulty, whom she had come to know as the man who stood between President Wilson “and the men who would use him,” respecting him as “staunch, shrewd, and loyal.” She personally visited him and Creel to vouch for Frances’s ability and tenacity and when her official appointment came through, Frances thanked the “generous, warm-hearted woman” profusely and went to New York to await further instructions.22
Frances’s assignment was big news. There was a full-page spread in Moving Picture World, two pages with pictures in Motion Picture Magazine, and a smattering of articles in the newspapers. Mary Pickford was “tearfully refusing to even discuss the necessity of getting another scenario writer” because “I am losing my best friend, the dearest chum I ever had.” Frances was painted as brave and spirited for being willing to serve and it was noted that she was relinquishing a $50,000-a-year salary in order to volunteer.23
Finally, on the cold, rainy morning of September 18, 1918, Frances joined more than nine hundred men of the 543rd Engineers Service Battalion on Pier 57 at the New York Harbor to board the Rochambeau, converted into a transport vessel and destined for Bordeaux with a convoy of other ships.
Frances thought the Rochambeau looked like “an old tub” and her fears proved justified when after two days at sea, “we hit a storm and the storm hit us back.” Waves poured across the deck and the ship was slapped from side to side by the raging ocean. Everyone was told to stay belowdecks, and Frances was lying scared and alone in her tiny cabin when from down in the hold, where the nineteen “colored troops” were housed, she heard “majestic voices rising in spirituals.”24
The Rochambeau had been forced so far off course that they landed on the northern coast of France at Brest instead of Bordeaux as planned. Everything about the transport was supposed to be secret, including Frances’s presence, so as she walked down the gangplank, “I was thunderstruck when I saw Fred Thomson standing there.” He had been in France only a week, but when he heard that a ship was about to dock unexpectedly in nearby Brest, he asked Colonel Fanoff, who had met Frances at Camp Kearney, for a one-day pass based on “a strange premonition” that she might be on board. Frances did not know if she or the colonel was more surprised when Fred brought her back to camp, but it reconfirmed to her that fate was indeed playing a hand in this relationship. Fred seemed so sure of her presence, and the comfort they had felt with each other in California was further entrenched.25
The next day, Frances headed for Paris to report to the CPI headquarters. She was made a lieutenant in the army and given her papers, including a pass signed by General Pershing, an officer’s uniform, a steel helmet, and a regulation belt with a gas mask attached. She was assigned to work with Harry Thorpe, one of Doug Fairbanks’s former cameramen, and Wesley Ruggles, a fledgling director from Hollywood now in the Army Signal Corps. She had known them slightly in California and Wes’s brother, the comedian Charles Ruggles, was an old friend from the Bosworth studio.26
Their task was to film the work of the Allied women. More than 20,000 American women served overseas during the war—10,000 as nurses in the army and navy and a few thousand under the auspices of the Red Cross, the YMCA, and the Salvation Army. Several hundred women were telephone operators with the Army Signal Corps and still others served as doctors, entertainers, canteen workers, interpreters, dentists, therapists, decoders, and in a myriad of other roles.27
Most of the one thousand professional entertainers who joined the war effort were connected to either the Overseas Theater League or the YMCA and over half were women. Cobina Johnson sang opera, the artist Neysa McMein sketched the soldiers, and Eleanor Robson gave dramatic readings. Frances just missed Elsie Janis, who had left France after more than three solid months of several shows a day and was now in London, heading the cast of Hello, America. In between performances, Elsie visited the injured in English hospitals.
Even though she had been in France off and on for over two years, Elsie was unable to sign up for the usually obligatory six months of service because of intermittent stage commitments. Since she never officially enlisted, Elsie was one of the few entertainers allowed to travel in “street clothes” instead of a uniform and she picked up the nicknames “The Regular Girl” and “The Sweetheart of the A.E.F.”28
Her popularity with the troops was unrivaled and she appeared before as many as 5,000 soldiers at a time, singing songs, telling her stories, and doing impersonations from the top of a shed, the caboose of a train, or whatever elevated, flat surface was available. Her astute sense of mimicry combined with several intense weeks of language lessons gave her a fluency in French with a “superb accent” that helped spread her renown to all the Allied soldiers. Almost always accompanied by her mother, Elsie Janis was credited with seeing more of the front than any officer.29
When live entertainment was not available, women delivered the film and ran the projectors for the hundreds of movies that were shown to the soldiers. Frances witnessed the popularity of movies time after time; they were shown in warehouses, airplane hangars, on battered portable screens, or projected against the wall of a building in the village square where townsfolk crammed in around the soldiers. “Charlie and Doug” were the two favorites, but anything showing familiar sights from home—the Statue of Liberty, a Chicago department store, or San Francisco’s Golden Gate—created a sensation and bolstered morale. Toward the end of the war German propaganda films left behind by the retreating army became a prime attraction.30
Frances traveled to and from Paris for a few days at a time, usually arriving on or near the front after a battle to witness doctors and nurses doing what they could for the injured in the shattered villages and burying the dead. She was struck by how thoroughly exhausted the Europeans were after four devastating years of war.
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