Chapter 2

      When Robert and Marion moved into their new home at 2600 Wilshire Boulevard in January of 1912, she stayed busy organizing the house while he opened C. W. Pike’s Los Angeles office. The demands of building his father’s business kept Robert downtown all day and into the night, and Marion failed to find domestic life particularly satisfying. It had been difficult enough to play the role of society matron in San Francisco where at least there was a society. This Los Angeles was another situation entirely.

      Los Angeles in 1912 was a sprawling flatland stretching between the ocean and the mountains. Within a thirty-five-mile radius, there were forty incorporated towns, and it was close to impossible to know where one ended and another began. While the southern California land boom of the 1880s had not brought the number of people who swarmed northern California in the Gold Rush, it had induced a variety of characters to seek out the sun and a new life. Families determined to create their own little utopias bought several hundred or thousands of acres at a time, primarily from the Spanish land grants that still dominated the area, infusing the new communities with their Midwestern values.

      Pueblos, acres of orange groves, a few hotels, schools, churches, homes, and clusters of businesses were indiscriminately interspersed with lean-to refineries and thousands of wells, the result of the discovery of oil twenty years earlier. The region was tied together by a combination of paved and dirt roads and the Pacific Electric Company’s Red Car line, with tracks running from San Fernando down to Newport Beach and from Riverside out to the Pacific Ocean. To fill her hours and satisfy her natural curiosity, Marion rode the Red Car, sitting alongside the tourists, workers, and cargo that depended on it as the only reasonable form of transportation.¹

      A new and steady outlet for Marion’s creativity was provided by the Los Angeles–based producer and theater owner Oliver Morosco. He had gone north to “raid his enemy’s territory” in search of actors, costume designers, and artists, and Marion had been recommended by her friend Waldemar Young, a reporter and grandson of Brigham Young who wrote the “Bits of Color Around the Town” column for the San Francisco Chronicle.²

      Morosco looked up Marion upon his return and scanned her portraits of Jack London, boxers Joe Gans and “Gentleman Jim” Corbett, Nob Hill debutantes, and local poets.

      “This is the kind of stuff I’m looking for,” he told her. “They catch the personalities.” He offered her the position of personal poster artist for his theater and promised that while “The job may not keep you busy all the time, I’ll help you find plenty of work. We’ve got a booming city if those damned movie outfits seeping in there don’t ruin it.”

      When she gave him a questioning look, he explained there were “gangs” all over town “making what we used to call flickers,” adding that the more respectable citizens wanted to run them out of town.³

      Los Angeles had first been introduced to the “screen machine” in 1896 when the lights were dimmed at the Orpheum and the image of a life-sized Anna Belle Sun danced for a few precious moments, projected onto a large white sheet. Since then, the technology had advanced considerably. Marion had been to the nickelodeons in San Francisco and watched the ten- to fifteen-minute “one reelers” shown between vaudeville acts. She found “the moving pictures” simple and awkward compared to live theater, yet she enjoyed the antics of a little blond girl known as “Goldilocks” and saw nothing at all offensive.⁴

      Anything different was intriguing to Marion and when she went in search of a new home closer to Robert’s office and the Morosco Theater on South Broadway, she quickly came face-to-face with what she considered shocking provinciality. There were plenty of vacancy signs, but the small print often read “No dogs or actors allowed” or “No jews, actors or dogs.” The bigotry appalled her and her resentment was compounded as she faced a barrage of questions at each door: “Do you live alone? Can you pay a month in advance? Are you in the flicks?”

      “No, I am an artist,” stated Marion proudly, but the distinction was not so clear to the inquiring proprietors. After several defeats, Marion rented a furnished home by telling the landlord her husband was a businessman and she was a seamstress; the easel she was moving in was to stretch and measure material.⁵

      Yet if she found her new fellow townsfolk boorish, she was immediately comfortable at the theater. Oliver Morosco described his stock company as “one big happy family,” and she quickly became friends with fellow San Franciscans Lewis Stone and Bert Lytell and a sweet, husky boy who looked more like a college football tackle than a rising star, Robert Z. Leonard. She adored the tall comedienne Charlotte Greenwood brought out to star in So Long Letty but Marion was a bit taken aback by the regal reserve of Morosco’s newest star, Laurette Taylor.

      Other members of the company were deferential to Morosco, but after reading the play, Marion walked right up to him and said earnestly, “Surely you aren’t going to put on an old wheeze like Peg o’ My Heart. Not after doing Shaw and Ibsen. It’s ‘Cinderella right out of the Dog Pound.’ ”

      Morosco warned Marion that it was a big success in New York and added, “Don’t you dare make any criticism about it to Miss Taylor. The play was written by her new husband.” Laurette Taylor took the role of the young ingenue to heart and Marion’s job was to paint the essence of the character and, she reminded herself, not the lines of age that were already showing on the still beautiful actress who posed in front of her.⁶

      Peg o’ My Heart was a smash, playing for a over a year, and with his profits, Morosco expanded his empire by importing the New York actress Kitty Gordon, nationally proclaimed as having “the most beautiful back in America.”

      Marion’s painting conspicuously featured Kitty’s famous asset, posing her glancing over her dazzling shoulders and down her bare back in a gown ending in a V at the waist. Morosco loved it, but when the lithographs went up, they were almost instantly vandalized. Letters protesting the poster poured into the newspapers and flyers were distributed in front of the theater.

      We must protect our innocent little children from seeing such obscene pictures of half-nude women. And we must keep them away from the evil influence of the nickelodeons and these lawless people who have forced themselves upon our beautiful city to make what they call movies. Only if we all unite can we drive them out.

      It was signed “Conscientious Citizens.”⁷

      The leaflets piqued Marion’s curiosity and she goaded a Morosco actor, Jimmy Gleason, into attending a “Conscientious Citizens” meeting with her. They were greeted by a “bilious little man” announcing they were already a third of the way to their goal of 10,000 signatures on petitions “to rid our city of these hoodlums.” He introduced “the groups that are working the hardest to bring about this emancipation,” and hotel owners and restauranteurs rose to promise not to allow anyone connected with the movies into their premises.

      A clubwoman explained why “legitimate” actors from the theater were different from these new hordes that cursed the city: “Stage folks keep their actions hidden behind closed doors, while those ‘flicker people,’ with their painted faces, perform shamelessly right out in the open.”⁸

      Marion and Jimmy were so offended by the small-mindedness of the gathering, they dubbed them “The Constipated Citizens,” yet they too had seen cameras, men with megaphones, and costumed actors all over town. Fires or police chases of any kind were fair game to be used as backdrops, as were horse races, sporting events, and parades. The participants were referred to as “movies” and Agnes de Mille remembered, “They were really outcasts. The Keystone cops would take over a street and do what they had to do