Without Lying Down. Cari Beauchamp
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Van Ness Avenue. The flames continued for three days and two nights and when they finally burned out, Chinatown, the Barbary Coast, the financial district, and the wooden tenements south of Market were nothing but ashes. More than 1,000 people died, 250 city blocks were devastated, and 300,000 men, women, and children were left homeless. “You have to forget the idea that there was a fire in San Francisco,” W. R. Hearst wrote. “There was a fire OF San Francisco.”15
The impact of the earthquake was not only physical. An atmosphere of equality and community spirit akin to the aftermath of war resulted as tents were pitched in vacant lots and parks and among the ashes of the Nob Hill estates. Debutantes and shopgirls, stockbrokers and beer hall bouncers all lived side by side for months. Children stood in lines several blocks long for free fruit and milk and the Red Cross distributed tins of food. Looters were shot on sight and bottled water became more valuable than gold.
Marion would later say that her family “lost everything” in the earthquake, but while their economic security was gone, their house remained standing. The Mark Hopkins Art Institute was obliterated, as was her father’s drug company and his warehouses. Len Owens had sold his interest in his advertising firm to concentrate on developing Aetna Springs as a summer resort, but now all available building materials were needed in the city and the economic demands of recovery left few with discretionary income for vacationing.16
Her mother was forced to forfeit any remaining hope of sending Marion to an eastern college. With her school and most vestiges of normalcy gone from the city, marriage became the next logical step, a way for her truly to be on her own. She openly enjoyed Wes’s “maulings,” as she called their lovemaking, and soon he was convinced that setting a wedding date was his idea.
In California a girl under eighteen and a boy under twenty-one had to have parental permission to marry. Though Len Owens was furious that Marion would even consider marrying a poor, nineteen-year-old artist—even though Wes had found work drawing for the San Francisco Chronicle—Minnie had been Marion’s age when she married and she resigned herself to her daughter’s determination. On Monday, October 21, 1906, Minnie accompanied Marion, Wes, and his father, Russell, to the temporary county offices in a converted house on Sacramento Street to sign the necessary papers for a marriage license.
Two days later, Marion’s older sister, Maude, recently married to Wilson Bishop, an up-and-coming insurance man, returned home to spend the night with Marion and early the next morning Wes and his sister Amy Belle arrived at the house to pick up Marion and Maude. Unsure of what to wear, Wes had bought four new ties the day before but forgot them all and then lost the ring as well. The girls waited patiently as he ran out to replace them and returned bedecked in his black wool suit, vest, and tie and with a new ring in his pocket, ready, as Marion said, “to be led to the halter.”
She had arranged for them to be married by her father’s former neighbor Reverend Bradford Leavitt, pastor at the first Unitarian Church. Yet as the foursome arrived at the Leavitt house on Jackson just in time for their eleven o’clock appointment, Wes realized that the only money he had left was a twenty-dollar gold piece; he did not want to give Reverend Leavitt more than ten dollars but was too embarrassed to ask for change. So out the door he headed again, down the steps and up the street. Maude ran after him, screaming for him to turn around as there were no stores in that direction. Marion and Amy Belle watched from the porch, laughing and crying at the same time.
The temperature was already in the seventies, and when Wes returned with the change, he was perspiring through his heavy clothes. Reverend Leavitt descended the stairs and tried to make the disheveled group comfortable, instructing Amy Belle and Maude to stand behind Wes and Marion, and proceeded with the brief ceremony in his downstairs parlor.
As he asked, “Wesley, do you take this woman to be your lawful wedded wife,” Marion looked up at Wes and saw what she thought was the “scardest, maddest, and percipitist bridegroom [sic]” she had ever seen and forgot her own whirling emotions for a moment. His forehead covered with sweat, his eyes darting in fear, Wes tried desperately to regain his composure and managed a very faint “Yes, sir.” Marion choked over her words as well. When they came to the moment he was to put the ring on her finger, the perspiration reached his eyes and he blindly grasped her hand.
“Marion . . . Marion, you . . . thee . . . with this wed . . . ring . . . I thee we . . .”
Reverend Leavitt’s smile broke the tension and Marion laughed out loud. Droplets were landing on her hand, but mercifully, the ceremony was over. Looking pale but grinning, Wes went off to work at the Chronicle and Marion, not giving up on all traditions, visited dressmakers to complete her trousseau with a new red suit and a selection of hats. For a honeymoon of sorts, they spent the weekend at a local hotel.17
Marion was selling occasional stories and paintings and Wes’s salary at the Chronicle was small but steady, yet economic realities mandated they live with their families. Four days after the brief ceremony, the newlyweds moved in with Wes’s parents and sisters on C Street in the Richmond district of San Francisco. After several months of restrained good behavior, Marion realized she had exchanged one set of watching eyes for another and, living with his parents, Wes seemed more of a son than a husband. Familiar with the constraints of sharing a roof with her own relatives, the couple moved in with her family.
Frustrated with what she felt were her limitations as a writer and an artist, Marion sought out her old family friend Jack London for advice.
“If you expect to write stories pulsing with real life or put upon canvas compositions that are divinely human, you must go forth and live,” he told her. “Study human nature by rubbing elbows with the people. Go out and work with them, eat with them, dream with them.”
Inspired by the dramatic seriousness of his words, Marion tried her hand at a variety of jobs. She pitted peaches at a local cannery until one slipped loose, hitting the woman working next to her on line. Accused of throwing it on purpose, Marion was given her walking papers ten minutes later.
She lasted an even shorter time as a telephone operator. Her head throbbed, her arms ached, and her ears rang from the callers’ “barbed wire voices.” Marion joked that she was fired before she could master any particular situation, but she turned the experiences into short stories and though most of them went unpublished, she consoled herself that she was practicing her art.18
Marion finally found steady employment as the assistant to the acclaimed photographer Arnold Genthe. He had risen to fame and fortune through his informal poses of society matrons and their families, but he also chronicled the streets of San Francisco and was known in Chinatown as “the white man with the camera.”
Genthe could not help but notice Marion’s beauty and she became his model as well. For a Baker’s Chocolate advertisement, he posed her with another young dark-haired beauty named Hazel Tharsing, just out of Catholic school. Hazel soon would shed her convent restrictions, change her name to Carlotta Monterey, and eventually marry Eugene O’Neill.
The photographer promoted Marion as “one of the ten most beautiful women in America,” but she was more comfortable on the other side of the camera. From Genthe she learned the art of layouts and experimented with color film. They discussed the philosophy books he loaned her and he introduced her to Minnie Maddern Fiske and other grandes dames of the stage, who always scheduled photographic sessions with “Ginky” when they visited San Francisco.19
Marion and Wes finally found a small place of their own on Gratton Street near Golden Gate Park, and that meant depending only on each other when it came to the daily minutiae of life. Marion loved to cook and entertain, but planning, shopping for, and preparing dinner on a daily basis were something else again. So was dodging the landlord when the rent was due. And occasionally, Wes would “forget he was married,” as Marion politely put it, and stay out all night.20
Wes was unhappy at the Chronicle, where he sketched trials and society matrons, and wanted to devote full time to his art. Marion’s work for Genthe was lessening as the photographer began spending more time in Carmel, where Jack London, George Sterling, and other established writers and artists had small