Without Lying Down. Cari Beauchamp
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way he wanted it, he rhetorically asked friends, “Why shouldn’t I divorce? Caesar did it. Napoleon did it.”7
Even Beth was already seeing someone else, an old friend from her debutante days, the Pittsburgh stockbroker James Evans. And when she finally went public and announced her separation from Fairbanks, Beth told some reporters that she suspected Mary Pickford as “the other woman.” Yet while the divorce was covered avidly by the press, Mary’s name was never printed and when asked, she emphatically claimed her relationship with “Mr. Fairbanks” was a purely professional one.
Mary had sent Frances the newspaper clipping when Beth was granted an interlocutory decree of divorce in November of 1918. The process itself was relatively civilized, with Doug agreeing to a one-time settlement of all his savings. His brother John took the train across the country to deliver a suitcase with half a million dollars in cash and securities to Beth and she in turn named “an unknown woman” as the cause of the divorce.8
Beth Fairbanks made the next move by marrying Jim Evans just as Mary entered into a very public professional relationship with Doug, Charlie Chaplin, and D. W. Griffith when they formed their own production company.9
The liberty bond tours had given Doug, Mary, and Charlie the opportunity to ask each other the obvious question: Why were they splitting profits with their producers? After all, people came to the movies to see them, not Zukor or Lasky. Yet their complaints and dreams might have remained just that if the trades had not reported in January of 1919 rumors of a merger between the two major distributors, Paramount and First National. Mary had thrived on playing one studio off against another to increase her income with each new contract and if such a merger occurred, she knew it would “clamp the lid on the salaries.”10
Chaplin always claimed that their initial public meetings and the press conference he held with Mary, Doug, and D. W. Griffith was as much a bluff to prevent the merger as anything, but the idea took on a life of its own and in the spring of 1919, they were formally signing the papers of their new corporation.
They called themselves United Artists, but the trades called it a “rebellion against established producing and distributing arrangements.” The four insisted their actions were “for the protection of their interests,” William McAdoo, the former secretary of the Treasury whom Doug had befriended on the bond tours, was named their general counsel, adding an air of prestige from outside the industry. McAdoo knew little about making pictures, but in these heady times, Doug, Mary, Charlie, and the Master himself represented the most successful and experienced combine imaginable.11
Busy with meetings and publicity, Mary still made time to shift her attention to Frances when she suffered a relapse of the flu and sent her doctor to the Hollywood Hotel to supervise Frances’s recovery. Flowers, bed jackets, and visitors arrived by the dozens and soon she was sufficiently recuperated to head north to San Francisco. She spent several days visiting her family and the Examiner covered her visit with a page one story, headlining her as “a war heroine.”12
Frances’s contract with Famous Players had been in abeyance while she was overseas, and because Mary was no longer at the studio, Frances could have challenged the arrangement. Yet if there was any question that they expected her to return, it was answered by the presence of their publicity man at the pier upon her arrival in New York. Not knowing when Fred would be home, Frances was comfortable working on a film-by-film basis and she wrote a scenario for Billie Burke and adapted four Anne of Green Gables books into one script for Mary Miles Minter, the new star Famous Players hoped would challenge the departing Mary Pickford.13
Mary asked Frances to write for her once United Artists started producing, but that was still at least six months in the future. Fred’s letters told her he was helping organize the Interallied Games in Paris over the summer and he would not be home until September at the earliest. While he was frustrated with the delay, the games were second in importance only to the Olympics and brought together athletes of the Allied countries already holding records and developed new competitors in every field. Fred wasn’t yet sure if he would compete, but he was working with a group of boxers and was particularly impressed with the winner of the light heavyweight championship of the American Expeditionary Force, “a young Irish boy named Gene Tunney.”
Frances was wondering what to do next while she waited for Mary when a telegram arrived: “Would you consider contract as writer and director at Cosmopolitan Studio, New York? Salary two thousand dollars a week. W. R. Hearst.”14
William Randolph Hearst. The publishing baron and owner of the San Francisco Examiner who had paid her fifteen dollars a week less than ten years before was now offering her $100,000 a year. There wasn’t much to think about. Yet just the same, she checked in with Adela Rogers, who had been working for Hearst as a reporter for over five years.
Adela adored Hearst and had nothing but praise for the man. She had been living a rather conflicted life since marrying the Los Angeles Examiner’s handsome young copy editor Ike St. Johns. She had resisted changing her last name, but her beloved father insisted upon it, “so not to belittle Ike’s feelings.” She compromised and used Rogers St. Johns, and joked she had married at the age of eighteen for fear of “being an old maid.”
She was juggling her roles of being a wife to Ike and taking care of Elaine and Bill, the two young children she had wanted so badly, but Adela came alive when she was reporting, especially covering murder trials. Her husband might complain, but Hearst had backed her at every turn and she was proud to have earned his respect.15
The only person Frances cared about who was negative about Hearst was her father. He was convinced “that Hearst alone was responsible for the sinking of the Maine, war with Mexico, our troops going to France, and the rising power of the unions.” Len Owens told Frances she was “going from bad to Hearst,” but his daughter was not about to be deterred. She understood working for Hearst meant writing for Marion Davies and she was intrigued by the prospect.16
Frances had first met Marion when she was one of the four beautiful chorus girls backing Elsie Janis during the short run of Miss Information in the fall of 1915. Marion was a stunning blue-eyed blonde, unpretentious and very funny. For all her flirting, Elsie was never jealous of pretty young women and she promoted Marion as “one of the most popular gals in town judging from the coffin-like boxes of flowers that crowded the stage entrance nightly.” Marion’s bubbling personality, her genuine interest in other people, and her ability to make everyone feel good about themselves made her well liked by other chorus girls as well as the wealthy, bored, and usually married men of New York.17
That was before Marion had “settled down” with William Randolph Hearst. She had literally watched from behind the curtains as her three older sisters became showgirls, each taking the last name of Davies for the stage. “Mama Rose” ruled the roost, supported by a combination of relatives, her daughter’s salaries, their boyfriends, and later their husbands. According to Anita Loos, her mother and sisters schooled Marion in the “Gigi tradition” of pleasing a man, for catching the eye of a producer or a rich “patron” was one of the few avenues to financial security available to girls from families like the Dourases.18
Marion was eighteen and Hearst over fifty when they became an established couple in 1916. The newspaper publisher’s anti-English and pro-German stance made him unpopular with many, but Marion never cared for politics or world affairs. He gave her a Tiffany watch after their first dinner together, the start of a stream of gift giving that would last for over thirty years.
W.R.—“the Chief”—was born and raised in San Francisco, the only child of Phoebe and George Hearst. His father made his first fortune in the silver from the Comstock Lode and invested in real estate and newspapers and eventually was elected United States senator from California. Concentrating on the Harvard Lampoon and the Hasty Pudding Club instead of his studies, W.R. left college during his junior year and made his first foray into publishing at his father’s San Francisco Examiner. He expanded the family fortune by buying papers in twenty cities including New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles and purchasing a magazine combine consisting of Cosmopolitan,