Without Lying Down. Cari Beauchamp
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from New York in the early 1900s, and ran unsuccessfully for mayor, governor, and twice for the presidency. By the time he met Marion, he had been married for more than ten years to another former showgirl, Millicent Willson, and was the father of five boys. The previously fun-loving Millicent showed an immediate affinity for the approval of society as soon as she married and W.R. was once again looking for diversion. Marion was hardly his first affair, but it became a serious one very quickly. He “favored fidelity in the abstract” according to his biographer W. A. Swanberg, and had “an enormous zest for life” and “an almost pagan worship of youth, energy, activity, sensation.”19
He expanded his empire to include movies in 1913 by producing newsreels and formed Cosmopolitan pictures as a showcase for what he was convinced were the great dramatic talents of Marion Davies. Anita Loos wrote Getting Mary Married for Marion, but when she and Emerson signed to work for the Talmadge sisters, she recommended Frances and W.R. embraced the idea.20
John Emerson, Anita, and Frances left Los Angeles together and when they arrived in New York, Frances called Hearst’s office for instructions. She was told she was expected at the Beaux Arts apartment building, where Marion Davies opened the door amid howls of laughter and blaring music. There in the center of half a dozen Ziegfeld beauties towered William Randolph Hearst, over a foot taller and thirty years older than any of the other giggling and dancing participants.21
“Hi, Fran-Frances,” said Marion. “Come in, we’re just tea-teaching W.R. how to shim-shimmy!”
Out of breath but not at all embarrassed, Hearst ceased shaking his shoulders and welcomed Frances. His large size and thin voice struck her as contradictory, yet he seemed totally at ease. He looked at her with his piercing blue eyes and told her he considered her the brains behind Mary Pickford’s success and he expected the same stardom for Marion. Frances praised Marion’s talents and personality, but cautioned him that Mary’s position was unique and expressed reluctance to write for Marion.
“Don’t you like her?” Hearst asked.
“Very much,” Frances assured him. “That’s why I don’t want to do anything which could jeopardize her career.”
“I don’t understand you! I’m willing to spend a million on each picture.”
“Lavishness doesn’t guarantee a good picture, Mr. Hearst. Marion is a natural-born comedienne and she is being smothered under pretentious stories and such exaggerated backgrounds that you can’t see the diamond for the setting.”22
Hearst was not used to direct criticism, but Frances had made her point and their mutual respect was sealed. They established that Frances would be given the freedom to finish her other commitments and be “loaned out” to make a United Artists film with Mary when the time came. All this and two thousand a week were worth a few concessions.
They found a story they could both agree on in The Cinema Murders, a light drama that had been serialized in Hearst’s Cosmopolitan magazine. It allowed for plenty of the theatrical costumes so important to Hearst, but Frances wrote in dancing scenes and comic interludes to show off what she considered Marion’s strengths. Their compromise marked the beginning of a fifteen-year tug-of-war over what was best for Marion.
Frances could write anywhere and Anita suggested sharing a house out on Long Island, since they were both making enough money to indulge in a “country home” for the season. They fell in love with the idea of a huge yard and growing their own vegetables. They hired experts, brought in soil, and dug with their own hands, but their visions of an enormous harvest to be shared with all their city friends began to wane with an infestation of bugs and then the spread of mildew. One night as they were preparing to actually eat the little home-grown bounty that had survived, Norma Talmadge called to invite them to dinner, but Anita declined. “Tonight Frances and I are eating four hundred dollars’ worth of peas.”23
They made the most of the weekend parties along the Gold Coast that F. Scott Fitzgerald would soon immortalize in The Great Gatsby. The misery of the war seemed far away and Frances noticed how few in their circle of friends and acquaintances seemed to have been touched by it or any problems that affected the real world. Prohibition had arrived, but like Attorney General “Palmer’s raids” and talk of unions, it was a minor unpleasantry to be worked around or, better yet, ignored.
As soon as a new speakeasy opened, the passwords were known to all who mattered and the only inconvenience seemed to be that they were now drinking out of teacups instead of glasses.
Serious drinkers arrived at serious solutions. Anita claimed that Charlotte Pickford simply bought an entire liquor store, secreted the inventory in her basement, and padlocked it to keep others in general and son Jack in particular away from her stash. Out on Long Island, delivery trucks arrived with kegs marked “Pickles” and soon whiskey, rum, or champagne would magically be served.24
Anita and Frances were both disciplined writers and they lived together easily, but one of the reasons Anita had pressed Frances into sharing the house was so she would have “a chaperon” for the constant presence of John Emerson. The tiny Anita was always a sucker for a tall man and his claim that he “never had been, nor ever could be, faithful to any one female” made him all the more irresistible. She convinced herself she was “different from all his other girls” and that behind his stoic presence was a great mind.25
Frances did not even pretend to understand the relationship. She thought Anita was a talented “dynamo,” smart and fun to be with, and found John a total dullard with a “constipated brain” who manipulated Anita. Yet Frances was learning to withhold her opinions and she was matron of honor when Anita married John Emerson on Sunday, June 15, 1919, in a garden ceremony at Joe Schenck and Norma Talmadge’s estate. Anita beamed in her long white lace dress, a large hat, and a huge bouquet, all serving to accentuate her tiny stature next to her beloved Emerson, dressed in white flannel pants, a dark blazer, and a jaunty straw hat.26
John and Anita left on a European honeymoon, a wedding gift from Joe Schenck, and Frances happily moved back to the Algonquin. With Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, and Robert Sherwood all working at Vanity Fair only a few doors away, they and their friends who regularly gathered at the hotel at noon were beginning to be called the Round Table. The name was acquired because other diners would point out Mrs. Fiske sitting next to Alexander Woolcott or H. L. Mencken next to George Kaufman and Ruth Hale “at the round table” in the center of the room. It was a casual group at first, but they were united in their seriousness about themselves and their writing.
While Frances and Dorothy Parker enjoyed each other privately, Frances was rarely at the hotel at lunchtime, and even when she was, she hesitated to join the group even for a brief visit. Her writing was of the “sentimental” type they disdained and Frances found their “verbal fencing” more exhausting than exhilarating.27
She was the first to agree that her stories were not up to their literary standards, but the money she was earning was staggering. The $2,000 a week she was receiving from Hearst was augmented by the Palmer Plan of Photoplay Writing when they paid her to endorse their correspondence school. A glamourous picture of Frances was featured in their ads and she was proclaimed the “highest salaried photoplaywright in the industry.”
Frances joined Frank and Bertha Case and other friends of Elsie Janis on May 31 when the Rotterdam brought “Ma” and her daughter home from England to a reception appropriate for a conquering hero. The band played Over There and a huge banner reading “Welcome Home, Elsie Janis” covered the entire side of the tugboat that greeted the ship.
Elsie spent a month being feted and honored throughout New York and was approached by several studios. Her popularity with the troops and the press coverage of her travels gave her a natural drawing power for the screen and she signed a four-picture, $5,000-a-week contract with Lewis Selznick’s elder son, Myron.28
Forming Selznick Picture Corporation was Myron’s way of celebrating his twenty-first birthday as well as getting back at the men he felt had betrayed his father. The senior Selznick