Without Lying Down. Cari Beauchamp
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but clearly in control of the relationship. Her real excitement was saved for her work and she describes her drawings with a passion that is missing when she discusses her marriage. She respected Wes’s talent more than she did her own, but knew she was much more ambitious than he. She acknowledged her “marked ability at catching a small likeness of any one I sketched or painted,” but considered it “a small skill.”21
Wes was becoming renowned for his use of colors, winning prizes and having his paintings published as magazine covers, but the recognition did not transfer into a large income. The romantic notion of two artists eking out an existence to pursue their dreams lost its luster in the reality of living from payday to payday and Wes and Marion agreed to separate. She publicly announced that two artists in one family could “not be a success” and on October 11, 1910, he filed for divorce on the grounds of extreme cruelty. When Marion was served with papers, she did not respond. From her own parents’ example, divorce was not something to be ashamed of and, since there were no children, she saw the experience as a “youthful indiscretion” and moved on.22
Marion took assignments as a commercial artist for companies like the Western Pacific Railroad. She painted landscapes of the vistas seen from the train, which were used as posters and dining car menu covers. She wrote poems to accompany the paintings and signed them Marion de Lappe:
A magic web, a sylvan dream Where sunlit pale green waters gleam And rocks rise clear to guard the stream Oh the golden Feather River In cloistered canyons soft winds sigh And lavish lights from a summer sky Blue mirrored in the shallows lie Oh the golden Feather River.23
Hoping that writing under deadline would hone her skills, Marion went to work as a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner for fifteen dollars a week. However, her sympathy for victims prevented her from writing flamboyantly enough for William Randolph Hearst’s news desk and she was transferred to the theater department.
Marie Dressler was billed as “the funniest woman of the English speaking stage,” and when one of the most experienced reporters gave Marion the assignment to cover the renowned vaudevillian’s opening in Tillie’s Nightmare in March of 1911, she couldn’t believe her good fortune.24
“It’s the chance of a lifetime, kid,” he told her. “Dressler is news. Get some sketches, a signed interview and they’ll give you a spread under Ashton Stevens’s review of the play.” Almost as an afterthought he added, “Of course, you’ll get canned if you come back without them.”
Taking his word as gospel, Marion joined the throng of reporters at the star’s door at the Savoy Theater. Miss Dressler greeted them with “Hi ya, pals,” and answered their questions with self-deprecating humor. Marion stood quietly in a corner until the famous comedienne looked directly at her and said, “Hello, little girl, Where’d you come from?”
“The Examiner,” Marion replied—to instant silence.
Everyone but Marion knew that William Randolph Hearst and Marie Dressler were in the midst of a fierce feud and as the reporters looked back at Marie for a response, she ordered Marion to get out, then turned and stormed to her dressing room, sharply slamming the door.
Backstage quickly emptied, but Marion stayed frozen in her corner. Several times during the performance, Marie swept past her looking straight ahead, and when the show was over and the theater dark, the star emerged from her dressing room dressed in her street clothes, a plumed hat, and a fur coat. Marion, still in her same corner, called out, “Miss Dressler, if I don’t get this interview, I’ll lose my job.”
Marie stopped, turned, and asked, “Is that what those bastards told you?
“Only a top reporter, but he said I’d be made if I got the story and fired if I didn’t.”
Marie shook her head in disbelief and took pity on the girl twenty years younger than she and half her size.
“Let’s go into my dressing room child and I’ll give you the golldarndest interview I ever gave to any reporter.”
Marie sent her maid to the corner to bring back coffee and “a couple of oyster loaves.” Marion started sketching and Marie explained her change of heart.
“Child, I couldn’t brush aside a young girl struggling to get along. Believe me, I’ve had some tough breaks myself. Imagine starting out in the theatrical business with a face like mine when beautiful girls are all the vogue. I said to myself, ‘You’re going to make the whole world laugh at you’ and that’s exactly what I have done.” She had risen to become the star of Tillie’s Nightmare, running for a year at the Herald Square Theater, in New York and now she was traveling the country in a private train with ten cars and a dining room that never closed.
Marion drew and wrote frantically for more than an hour, listening to the laughter that punctuated Marie’s stories but sensitive to the sadness that underlay even her funniest tales. They left the theater together and Marie offered her a ride. As Marion started to get out, Marie patted her cheek. “I’ve always wished I had a daughter,” she said, and with a smile added, “I’ll see you again.”25
Marion ran up the stairs to the Examiner offices, quickly wrote the story, and turned in her drawings. Though Marie wrote Hearst a note the next day that ended their feud shortly thereafter and they remained friends the rest of their lives, at the time it was enough to keep Marion’s story out of the paper. It was widely known and respected that she had broken down Dressler’s resistance, but the experience increased Marion’s self-doubts and her questions about what she was doing.26
San Francisco was almost completely rebuilt and Marion agreed with the visiting Englishwoman Beatrice Webb, who called it a “veritable paradise” for anyone “who wishes to live unto himself without any pressure of law, custom or public opinion.” Marion had already seen and accomplished a great deal and enjoyed her reputation as “The Wild Rose of Telegraph Hill” with her artist friends, who valued talent before commerce, but at the age of twenty-two she felt the need to escape. Escape from what or to where, she wasn’t sure.27
Then along came a man offering to make the decisions for her. Robert Dickson Pike was a Stanford graduate, a member of the Bohemian Club, and a rising star at his father’s fast-growing steel firm. In many ways, he was the antithesis of what Marion had been seeking for the past five years, yet Robert represented a level of economic security and social acceptance that was very tempting. The deciding factor for Marion was that her father and Robert’s traveled in the same circles and her engagement garnered Len’s approval like nothing she had accomplished before. And in place of her self-doubts and the often trying challenge of living on her own, Robert told her she was talented and beautiful and made it all seem so easy.28
As Robert Pike’s fiancée, Marion officially entered the realm of the society women Arnold Genthe regularly photographed and it was one of his pictures of her, looking out from under a broad-brimmed hat, that appeared as her engagement picture on page one of the San Francisco Call.
Marion was labeled a “philosopher, artist and society girl—to say nothing of being pretty” who had “decided between the bountiful life of a comfortable wife and the leanness that often attends the struggles of the ambitious.” While the article pointed out she had “achieved more than ordinary success” as an artist and “received flattering offers from the east,” Marion claimed, “All of my ambitions are laid aside. This, I hold, is substantial proof that I am truly and unreasonably in love.”29
With her final divorce papers signed the week before, Marion’s and Robert’s families and a few friends gathered at six o’clock on Tuesday evening, November 14, 1911, at the Swedenborgian Church, where once again Reverend Leavitt, under more formal circumstances, performed the marriage ceremony. A reception and dinner followed at the Pikes’ luxurious apartments at the Fairmont Hotel.
When Marion and Robert became engaged, they intended to spend their honeymoon abroad and live in New York, which, as the papers pointed out, “is so convenient to the capitals and art centers of Europe.” But by the time of the