The Girls in the Picture

by Melanie Benjamin

  Although it was strange, wasn’t it, that I’d never seen Lois Weber proposition an actor whom she was thinking of casting?

  Mary continued to laugh at my prissy expression, and I had to admit that I was stunned for another reason. The one thing I brought to this blossoming friendship, so that it wasn’t as lopsided as I sometimes feared, was the sophistication of the divorcée from San Francisco. I was better educated than Mary; after all, I’d gone to finishing school, studied Latin and the classics, and I’d been raised in comfort—stifling comfort, but still comfort. Mary had been raised in a trunk and hadn’t gone to school at all, and I knew my friend was deeply sensitive about this, desperately trying to make up for it.

  And I’d known men, many more men than Mary had—yet now, I realized with a shock that since I wasn’t an actress and hadn’t grown up in the theater, I was far more sheltered than Mary had ever been. Why had I never even thought to ask her about this kind of abuse; what else had she, and others like her, had to suffer—to accept—as part of the steep price some men exacted for a woman’s ambition?

  “Oh, Fran, don’t look that way! Of course Griffith expects to have affairs with all his little actresses—he’s hardly the only one, you know. I learned that on my first day working with him, but I never said yes and for some reason, he didn’t make me pay the way he did with others. Although—you know, that might be one reason why I fell so hard for Owen.” Mary looked thoughtful. “Being with him protected me from Griffith, and then other directors, too.” She gave a short, dry little laugh. “Well, I wasn’t going to be simply another one of Griffith’s little dolls, so eventually, I left. Although I respected the work we did, I couldn’t put up with his controlling ways. He wants his little actresses to simper and curtsy and ask ‘how high?’ when he says ‘jump.’ Still, I’m in awe of what he’s done tonight. Now people will stop wondering if this movie craze will last. It will, because of what Griffith has done. He’s elevated a fad into an art form.”

  “He inspires me to want to work harder,” I confessed as finally the audience began to move, like a herd, to the doors. Mary adjusted her hat so her curls were fully hidden; she glanced around nervously, and seemed to make herself appear smaller and less attractive. It was a neat trick, one that I’d noticed before. “Ten reels, though! The cost of it all—do you think it will earn it back?”

  “I don’t know. That’s the question—what does the audience really want? Short flickers that cost a nickel but only last a few minutes, or something longer, like a book, to get lost in for an hour or two? Or three, in this case.” Mary shook her head, and I could almost see the gears in her mind clicking. Another thing I’d learned about Mary, in the short time we’d become close; her mind never rested. She was always thinking, strategizing, ferociously determined to stay one step ahead of everyone else. No wonder Mary and Griffith had clashed; they were so very similar.

  “The thing is,” she continued thoughtfully, “are there enough directors who can—”

  “Miss Pickford? Mary?” A woman stopped in the aisle and planted herself directly in our path, holding out a pencil and a small album. “Can I have your autograph?”

  “Mary? Mary Pickford?” Now others were turning to stare, and even as I reached toward Mary to protect her somehow—shield her, perhaps?—she shook me off and removed her hat, revealing her golden curls, and soon there was a small crowd closing in. Forgotten was our conversation; she smiled happily and signed each and every piece of paper thrust in front of her, shook every hand, accepted every hug.

  “Excuse me, miss?” I looked up; a man with a pathetic little mustache doffed his hat and handed me a card. “You’re Miss Pickford’s maid? Could you give her this? I represent the Mademoiselle cosmetic company and we’d love to talk to Miss Pickford about representing our face cream.”

  Before I could reply that I was most certainly not Miss Pickford’s maid, the man had disappeared into the crowd, just as Mary signed her last autograph.

  “Oh, Fran, I’m so sorry!” She came rushing back to me looking anything but; she had a contented smile on her face as she shoved her hair back into her hat. “Mama taught me never to refuse my fans. And they are dears, aren’t they? So devoted!”

  I accepted her quick hug, and she hooked her arm through mine as we stepped out of the theater.

  I also crumpled up the business card and threw it to the ground.

  We strolled down the street to Mary’s automobile, a black 1915 Buick touring car. It was lovely, and I couldn’t suppress a pang of envy at its rich sleekness. Even if I wasn’t a maid, I was still a long way from owning my own automobile. Mary pushed the button, the engine sputtered to life, and we drove off, down wide, hilly streets toward the neighborhood called Hollywoodland, where we both rented bungalows in one of many new courtyard complexes that were being built by savvy real estate investors; there was a perpetual housing shortage now that the trains disgorged hundreds of new citizens every day. Los Angeles was a boom town.

  Mary parked the car expertly on the street, and we trooped up toward our twin bungalows. They sat side by side, sharing a little side yard. The light on Mary’s porch was on, and a plump figure rose out of the shadows with a groan.

  “Mama, it was amazing—you have to go soon!” Mary cried.

  “Really? That Griffith? I still don’t like the way he treated you at Biograph.” Charlotte Pickford pursed her wide mouth, turned up her generous nose, and I grinned.

  Mary Pickford’s mother was already the stuff of legend in the movie industry. “Love Mary, hate the mother,” everyone said. “So pushy. She’s a drunk, too. Mary doesn’t make a move without her.”

  But I liked Charlotte; I liked her a lot. Now I knew where Mary got her practical mindset that seemed to stun those who only saw her as the sometimes angelic, sometimes adorably pugnacious creature on the screen; a creature made of light and air and wishes. That wasn’t the Mary I knew; in real life, Mary and Charlotte Pickford were the most intensely practical women I’d ever met.

  It was Charlotte who kept Mary’s books, and she’d taken over the job for me, as well; I had no head for figures. Money was meant to be spent, and now that I was earning so much—fifty dollars a week!—and I was on my own, no husband to report to, well—I bought everything I desired. It would all go away soon, wouldn’t it? I couldn’t imagine that I’d keep earning this much; someone would find me out, see me for the fraud I was, and then I’d be back drawing and living in a boardinghouse. But at least I’d be fabulously dressed.

  Charlotte did not think this was a prudent course. She urged me to save every penny, as Mary did. Charlotte mothered me, worried after me, almost as much as she did her daughter, and I enjoyed every bit of it; my own mother had only worried about how I reflected upon her in society.

  Of course, Mary earned a far greater income—how much, I never wanted to know, only that it was so vast it might as well have been play money—and Charlotte wisely invested it in land, although not in houses. So the highest-paid actress in the world rented a small bungalow in a modest courtyard next door to her new best friend—me.

  And I loved it. As busy as I was now at work, and at play, I’d sometimes been lonely since Robert left. I’d moved from one dreary boardinghouse to another, not even bothering to unpack my trunks. Now, I was practically keeping house with Mary and Charlotte, and I felt younger, more girlish, than I had in years. It was as if I’d stupidly vaulted into adulthood with those disastrous two marriages, growing up too soon, taking myself and my problems far too seriously.

  But in the movies, time did not always travel in a linear manner; it zigged and zagged, leaping forward, falling back, and there was always a chance at redemption. Was that what I was having now? A chance to go back and start over? Had Mary given me that?

  Living next door to Mary, it was as if I was transported back to my boarding school days, before I allowed men to turn my head and derail my dreams. The two of us gossiped and giggled like roommates; we tried out new hair
dos on each other and speculated about the future. Now, if I was lonely or sad or bored, I only had to go out on my porch and yell across the way for Mary to answer in her sweet, lilting voice. We ran in and out of each other’s houses without bothering to knock—the doors were always unlocked—and we cooked up culinary experiments—disasters, really; oh, the time Mary decided to put mushrooms in biscuits! But it didn’t matter how near we came to poisoning ourselves because Charlotte, den mother extraordinaire, always swooped in to fix our mistakes.

  I didn’t see my chums from the Ship Café as much as I used to; Mary didn’t like to go out. So confident in the studio, when she was outside of it she often seemed poignantly shy and self-conscious; it was her lack of schooling, I decided; it had a way of dampening the spirit that came so alive when only the camera was watching. Most Saturday nights the three of us stayed in, popping corn and sitting out on the porch, while Charlotte regaled us with old Irish ghost stories about faeries and sprites.

  As different as I felt and looked, Mary had changed, too. No longer was she the wary, watchful—so very careful—porcelain figure I’d first met, only months before—impossible! In a short time, we’d become each other’s entire lives. It was almost as if Mary, upon deciding she deserved a friend, had shed a too-tight corset she’d been wearing for years; the warmth of the trust she’d placed in me was startling.

  I genuinely loved this Mary, this girlish, giddy Mary who laughed more easily, allowing more of her surprising wit to escape. Sometimes she’d stop in the midst of some silly thing we were doing—like the time I taught her to throw spaghetti against the wall to see if it was cooked and soon her entire kitchen was draped in stringy pasta—and I’d be stunned to see tears in her eyes, which had just, a minute before, been blazing with merriment.

  “Oh, Fran,” she told me once as she swiped away those tears. “You don’t know, you just don’t know—I never had the chance to have fun like this! To be a child. I was always working.”

  I hugged her so tightly then; with all my heart I wished there was a way I could give her a childhood, to turn back the hands of time.

  When the sun disappeared, so, too, would our silliness; nights were for pinning up our hair, or, if it was washing day, we’d go into Mary’s kitchen and let Charlotte spoil us both. Of course, my hair was a much simpler thing; it was just hair. Mary’s hair was something else; it was almost as if it were a person, the care it took, the time and responsibility. Poor Mary was held hostage by those long blond curls that had to be rinsed in champagne and lemon juice, wound patiently around Charlotte’s fingers, and pinned up in rags every single night.

  As our locks dried, we’d sit side by side on the wide porch swing, inhaling the lavender Charlotte planted in the courtyard. In the flickering light of hanging lanterns, I’d read book reviews out loud to Mary; we were always looking for a new property to persuade Adolph Zukor, the head of Famous Players, to buy for her.

  And I was beginning to sketch aloud ideas of my own, welcoming Mary’s input. Mary Pickford knew more about making movies than anyone I’d met—more than Lois, more than Bosworth, maybe even more than the Great Griffith himself. Whenever I shared a story, Mary would instantly grasp the technical aspect—“Well, that’s a fun idea, Fran, to have three cars chasing one another, but how will you shoot it? You’ll need one camera on each car the way you’ve written it, and that’s not really possible, financially, for a one-reeler. Now, if you expand it to two or three reels maybe, but I wonder. The plot is awfully thin…”

  And I’d look at my friend, this tiny, sometimes terrifyingly smart sweetheart of the movies, and shake my head, and make notes. And remember everything.

  “Are you girls hungry?” Charlotte asked now, despite the late hour. Anxiously, she gazed at Mary; she had privately told me Mary was too skinny, and she was worried about her. But Mary confided that Charlotte didn’t understand how the camera added heft to an image; what was an asset in the theater—the ability to be seen from the farthest row of seats—was a liability in movies; that’s why she ate like a bird.

  I sniffed the air: chicken and dumplings. There was always something bubbling away on Charlotte’s stove, something so hearty and fragrant it could stick to your ribs simply by inhaling.

  “Smells delicious!”

  There was always a bottle or two hidden away in a cabinet, as well, but I pretended not to notice that. Charlotte was a drinker, and Mary would not say a disparaging word about it. “You don’t know, Fran,” she insisted, shaking her head. “You can’t know how hard it was on Mama, when we were small. How poor we were, how we never had a home. Mama took her courage where she could find it.”

  There was a difference, of course, between a drunk and a drinker—and so I looked the other way on the nights when Charlotte started slurring her speech, indulging herself in nostalgic reminiscences of a glamorous life on the road that had no relationship to the harsher one Mary described. And Charlotte’s Irish brogue always was a bit thicker on these nights.

  “But I’m not really hungry,” I decided, despite my growling stomach; even if I didn’t want to be an actress, I didn’t mind being mistaken for one. “Thank you, though, Mrs. Pickford.”

  “Charlotte to you, dear. Don’t make me tell you again!”

  I smiled. “Charlotte.”

  Mary’s front door opened and slammed, and two figures ran out, hooting with laughter.

  “Hey, Mary!”

  “Hello, Sis!”

  “Where are you two going?” Mary’s eyes narrowed at her brother and sister. Jack Pickford was slight, almost feminine despite his mustache; Lottie Pickford was a big, boisterous girl who, at the age of twenty-two, already looked blowsy. She had her sister’s eyes, but her hair was dark, her manner as free and careless as Mary’s was disciplined and cautious.

  “Out on a spree. Come with us,” Jack called, and Lottie doubled over with laughter.

  Mary frowned. “Don’t you both have an early call tomorrow?”

  “Sure. We’ll make it—we might be wearing the same clothes, but we’ll make it,” Lottie promised gaily, as the two ran to Mary’s car without even asking.

  Mary watched them go, then she spun around, hands on hips.

  “I got them those jobs! They wouldn’t be working if it wasn’t for me! But it’s up to them to keep them. I don’t know what to do about them, Mama! I simply don’t—I lecture and lecture, but they don’t listen to me at all. What have I done wrong?”

  “Nothing, dearie, nothing. They are who they are. Just love them, and be the same good girl you’ve always been, my pride and joy, my rock,” Charlotte soothed, and reluctantly Mary smiled again, although her eyes remained hard and furious. I bit my tongue; I’d already learned the hard way that no one could criticize Mary’s family but Mary.

  But then it was Charlotte’s turn to frown.

  “He came by earlier.”

  “Owen? What did he want?”

  “Money.”

  “I gave him his allowance two days ago.”

  “Yes, you did, you generous thing. Don’t you worry about him. I’ll take care of it.”

  “No, Mama, no. I’ll see him tomorrow.” Mary’s small shoulders sank.

  “I’ll go with you,” I whispered impulsively in her ear. She smiled gratefully.

  “You look pale.” Charlotte hovered and clucked like the mother hen that she was. “You need to go to bed now, darling. You, too, Fran. I’ll bring you both hot water bottles and warm milk.”

  Mary’s eyes now twinkled as she flashed me an exasperated look, but to her mother she meekly replied, “Oh, thank you so much, Mama. But I’m going to sit out here a few minutes with Fran, if you don’t mind. You should go to bed, though. It’s late.” It was, for us; it was nearly ten o’clock, and we had to be at the studio by seven.

  “All right, dears, I’ll take myself off to my old widow’s bed.” But Charlotte winked as she said it.

  “Fran, you know what I was thinking? I mean, before all—this
.” Mary gestured wearily, then settled into one of the cushioned wicker chairs on her porch. I took the other, removing my very fashionable—but rather pinching—new shoes with a groan. I tossed them and stretched my legs out, flexing my stockinged toes.

  Then I looked up at the stars. They were so close they looked as if, with one poke of my finger, they might scatter, like brilliant billiard balls.

  “What?”

  “I was thinking about tonight, how excited I am, how besotted, really, by Griffith’s movie. By all the movies. I’m in love, actually—that’s what it is. And I wonder why I can’t feel that way about my own husband. Why I only feel weighed down by him.”

  I was silent for a time, choosing carefully from the array of responses that had popped into my head. Mary could be bizarrely protective of her husband. Even if she couldn’t quite bring herself to live with him.

  “Well, I think that Owen is threatened by your talent, to be frank. And, darling, you did marry young, before you knew much about him.”

  “Oh, I know all that. But that’s not what I’m talking about. Fran, I wonder if…if I’ll ever feel about any man the way I feel about my career, the movies. The passion I know—whatever passion I possess, I mean, in my heart—it’s all caught up in this, in what I’m doing. What we’re doing.” In the moonlight Mary’s delicate face looked plainer, more ordinary, than it did during the day. Hers was a face designed for bright lights and camera close-ups. “Sometimes I wonder if I’m less of a woman because I love my work so much, because it’s all I want to talk about, think about. We’re not supposed to do that, are we? We women. We’re not supposed to love something more than we’re capable of loving a man.”

  “But it’s fine for men.” I was relieved that the conversation had strayed away from Owen, specifically. Owen was Mary’s cross to bear; the penance she seemed to think she was required to pay for her success, perhaps. Catholic guilt—that was something that I couldn’t begin to argue away.