The Girls in the Picture

by Melanie Benjamin

  But what fun we had, watching ourselves in our unformed youth! I couldn’t bear to watch myself in those old Lois Weber films any more now than I could back then, but at least now I knew myself, knew my place in this industry. Bessie Love and Alma Rubens and Pola Negri—huge stars now—cackled with glee to see themselves as extras back then, supporting stars who were no longer stars. They hooted and hollered as they glimpsed themselves preening for the camera, trying to catch its favoring eye. And my dear friends Anita Loos and Adela Rogers St. John howled with miserable laughter to watch their early screenplays, wondering what on earth they’d been drinking!

  I, too, sometimes winced—especially at those films from World—but mostly I was happy. Happy to be in the company of these women, actresses, writers, directors; happy to be able to turn the lights back on and settle down and talk shop, freely helping, supporting, advising.

  “Did you hear about poor Gloria Swanson?” Theda Bara—a panther on-screen but a rather dumpy-looking woman in real life—asked one night after I switched on the lights.

  “What about her?” asked Theda’s equally dumpy sister, who was always with her, even on set.

  “Her husband has accused her of adultery in the divorce—naming thirteen other men including Valentino! Poor Gloria, he’s such a louse. But now her studio is insisting that she have one of those morals clauses put in her contract, even though everyone knows she wasn’t the one who had affairs. At least not with Valentino!”

  “My newest contract has a morals clause, too,” piped up the beautiful Pauline Starke.

  “We all have one,” someone else muttered. “Thanks to Will Hays. If I engage in—or am merely charged with, like Gloria—‘adulterous conduct or immoral relations,’ they can cancel my contract. Do you think any of the studio heads have morals clauses? No. But they’re the worst—they’re the ones with the casting couches literally inside their offices.”

  “You know C. B. DeMille doesn’t have a morals clause,” I said, pouring out a new round of cocktails. None of the moguls did, and the hypocrisy made me furious.

  “No, he has a harem,” Norma Talmadge murmured; she was usually quiet at these parties; it was rare that she spoke up. “Everyone knows he’s been having an affair for years with his secretary, his scenarist, anyone who moves!”

  “Except Gloria—and isn’t that the irony?” Bess Meredyth sighed. I loved Bess; she was the one who had so generously taught me everything she knew about screenwriting, back when we were both at Bosworth. “Everyone assumes DeMille and Gloria are lovers because she’s starred in so many of his films. But they aren’t—although not because C.B. hasn’t tried. Poor Gloria. She does have rotten luck with men.”

  “Remember what happened between her and Wally Beery?” Anita Loos, in her usual youthful outfit—a little girl’s high-necked nightgown—piped up. Bess and I exchanged looks; Anita’s own husband, John Emerson, was no prize. He tried to take credit for everything that Anita wrote—except for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes; that he merely resented and belittled every chance he got—and he slept around when she was away. Why did smart, successful women have such terrible taste in men? It was as if they looked for ways to sabotage themselves, as if they felt they didn’t deserve success personally as well as professionally. And I knew that if I hadn’t lucked into Fred, I’d be right there along with them.

  “Wally made her get an abortion, you know, because he didn’t want her to ruin her career; he thought she’d be his meal ticket,” Anita continued blithely. “Gloria told me. She was devastated.”

  “Do you think the doctors are on the studio payroll now? Do you think they’ll tell them, with all this morals clause stuff going on?” Norma Talmadge looked terrified, as did so many.

  I knew, of course, that abortion was the dirty little secret in Hollywood. Glamorous actresses weren’t supposed to be mothers; the public would stop going to see their pictures if they thought that the desirable vamp on-screen was changing diapers off it. And few actresses could afford to take the time off for a pregnancy; not with trains disgorging hundreds of would-be starlets every day. Francis X. Bushman could go home to his family of seven and not see his screen image suffer. But not Pola Negri. So we women, as usual, paid a price for our passion in a way that men did not.

  “The sins you do two by two, you pay for one by one,” sang one of Hollywood’s most reliable “female doctors” as he passed out champagne to his patients, as if that would make the ordeal any less soul-searing. A very few women who found themselves in trouble chose to go away for a while, returning to Hollywood slimmer than ever, then surprising everyone by adopting a child, “Because I simply fell in love with him, when I was visiting the orphanage for publicity!” Barbara La Marr had recently done this, with the requisite photo spread in Photoplay with the new baby “who didn’t look a thing like her, but a mother’s love knows no bounds,” as Louella Parsons loyally wrote in her gossip column. Because she, too, was on the studio payroll.

  But I knew only the biggest stars would be able to get away with any of this; only the biggest stars would be able to rely on the studio paying to cover up their sins—if passion, love, rotten luck were truly sins, and I didn’t happen to think they were. The rest would find their contracts canceled by these new hypocritical morality clauses.

  More than ever, I was grateful I wasn’t an actress. Fred and I longed to have a baby together, and if we did, it wouldn’t interfere with my work at all. Nobody—not even Louis B. Mayer—really cared what a scenarist looked like, and I could write from a hospital bed if I had to. And because I longed for a child, I wasn’t quite sure how I felt about those actresses who had—willingly or unwillingly—chosen to terminate a pregnancy, other than to be extraordinarily grateful that I wasn’t in their shoes. I understood the devouring nature of this business—chew them up, spit them out, because there are always more on the way. I also understood that men never had to wrestle with that kind of dilemma, and it wasn’t fair. Men could have affairs without worrying about the consequences—well, except for homosexual men. Billy Haines, so charming off-screen and on, was known to be queer; so was Ramon Novarro. And both were terrified about the new morals clause.

  I was nearly forty; pragmatically, I knew I’d probably missed my chance at motherhood. And in that way, wasn’t I exactly like everyone else? We’d all put our careers first, we brilliant, beautiful women. We all sacrificed something. Marriages. Children. Things a man never had to sacrifice.

  “How is Mary? Why doesn’t she ever come to these parties?” Adela asked me as we got up to pour ourselves more cocktails before settling down for more gossip. Adela had given up her gum snapping and now wore terribly sophisticated clothes, and had bobbed her hair. As usual, I felt like a country bumpkin next to her, even though one quick glance in the mirror assured me that my black hair was coiled sleekly as usual. Tonight we were both wearing expensive silk pajamas, although Adela had topped hers with a glorious kimono I immediately coveted.

  “I invite her, of course. Every time. But she always says she and Doug have plans.”

  “He’s trapped her on that estate.” Adela shook her head. “I feel sorry for her. I think she’s terribly lonely, after all.”

  “I don’t know,” I answered slowly; as loyal as I was to Mary, I wasn’t blind to her faults. “I’m not entirely sure who has trapped whom. Doug likes people, he likes to go out and have fun. Once I was with them on the beach—of course, not just the beach, not with Doug and Mary. They’d arranged for enormous tents to be set up, and a catered dinner on the Pickfair china. Remember the days when we used to go out to Santa Monica or Laguna? With only a blanket and a picnic basket, and we’d come home covered in sand? And think we were the luckiest people alive to live where we lived, and do the work that we did?”

  “We were. We are.”

  “Well, anyway, we were on the beach and on the drive back, Doug saw a sign for a dance marathon down on one of the piers and he wanted to go. But Mary said—I still can’t qu
ite believe it, but she said in that way she has with him, ‘Oh, Douglas! You know we can’t be seen in those kinds of places!’ ”

  “Oh, Fran!”

  “I know. And so, I wonder. Even when—back when we were—” And I struggled to give voice to what I was really thinking.

  Back when Mary and I were friends.

  Because I didn’t know if we were, anymore. And for a moment my hands trembled and Adela quickly took the cocktail shaker away from me, flashing an understanding smile.

  “Back when we were closer,” I finally decided to say. “Even back then, she didn’t like to go out much. I used to invite her to join our gang that hung out at the Ship Café, remember? But she never would go. She’s always hung back, apart.”

  “And now, she’s royalty. Or so she thinks. Everyone worships at the altar of Doug and Mary. Don’t get me wrong, I love Mary and I like Doug, I always have. But they’re turning into waxworks, waiting for the world to come see them up at the castle. The only time they leave is to go to work or go to Europe in order to see how much they are adored by people who don’t speak English. We all have to pay obeisance to them. It would do her good to come here sometime and join us girls, let those famous curls get tangled a little.”

  “Well, maybe if you ask.” I smiled ruefully, my heart smarting. “Goodness knows I’ve tried.”

  As Adela went to freshen up some drinks, I tried to remember the last time I’d talked to Mary, really talked like we used to.

  After The Love Light, we seemed to have—drifted apart. Of course we saw each other at industry functions and premieres, and Mary always greeted me warmly with a hug and a kiss, touchingly glad to see me. As I was to see her; I missed her, missed how easily we used to be able to finish each other’s thoughts and shared the same dreams, missed her sober dedication to her craft. I’d now worked with many actors and not one of them came close to Mary’s single-mindedness on the set.

  And of course, when summoned to Pickfair for one of those glittering, interminable evenings I always obeyed, even when Fred found an excuse to stay home. But every time I visited, it seemed as if Mary were encased in another layer of finely spun glass. She looked more beautiful than ever now that she was in her thirties; her skin still was like porcelain, lit from within by a special glow, and her sense of style was much more sophisticated than it once had been. Her films still did well, if not quite as well as they once had. Some, like Little Lord Fauntleroy, were truly works of art. It was obvious that Mary was seeking to be known as someone—something—more than the little girl with the curls that we’d created together, and I could only applaud her growth and risk-taking as an artist. And stifle a sigh when she reverted back to form, as she had in Little Annie Rooney, in order to pay the bills—or ensure her stardom.

  She was trapped, that’s what she was; Mary was trapped like a fly in amber, unable to stray too far from what her public loved, yet facing the cruel inevitability of time, time that would age her out of these roles, into—what? The public wanted her to remain a child on-screen and a queen off it.

  But what did she want? I didn’t know. And that smarted. Quite a lot.

  There was no denying it; we weren’t as close as we’d been. For the first time in our lives, I had absolutely no idea what Mary did every day, who she saw, what her habits were.

  Maybe it was because The Love Light, our first movie together in which she truly played a woman, a woman with a baby, hadn’t done well? Of course, I knew that Mary wasn’t happy on the set; I saw how she rolled her eyes whenever I spent too much time on Fred. But goodness, the final movie was all Mary—I’d made sure of it. Mary heroic, Mary spunky, Mary good. Once upon a time, working with my best friend had been the very definition of happiness. But no more.

  Maybe it was because we were married now and it was inevitable that our husbands took up the bulk of our lives away from work. Maybe Mary suspected that I really didn’t like Doug. I knew that Mary didn’t think much of Fred, despite her constant crowing that she’d been the one to introduce us.

  Maybe it was simply the inevitability of time, of two people growing apart, developing other interests, learning to rely on ourselves rather than on each other.

  Whatever the reason, as I gazed at the basement full of women I could call, without hesitation, my friends, I knew there was one person missing. One very important person. And for a moment, my vision was clouded with surprising tears.

  “I’ve got a new record,” cried Bessie Love. “Fran, where’s the gramophone?”

  Blinking the tears away, I laughed and rushed over to put the record on Fred’s newest toy, a huge RCA Victor cabinet model. I placed the record on the turntable, vigorously cranked the handle, and a wild, jazzy tune began to play.

  “C’mon, everyone! Let me teach you this new dance I’m doing in my next movie. It’s called the Charleston!” Bessie tossed her sleek bobbed hair and began to dance, an odd dance that required her to bend her knees and kick, arms swinging, as she rotated on the floor. Everyone screamed, and soon we were all trying, arms flailing, knees knocking. I couldn’t get the hang of it; it seemed awkward and disjointed. Give me the good old Turkey Trot anytime.

  I paused to catch my breath—Lord, I was perspiring, my hair was coming undone, but goodness, were we all having a good time!—and I couldn’t help but think that Mary would never fit in here, even if she did accept my invitation.

  If Mary did have a place in my life, it would have to be in quiet, unexpected moments, hidden from the view of tipsy flappers and the screaming of the jazz blaring out of the gramophone. This was a new age, an age of rouged knees and short dresses and rolled stockings and flasks tucked into garters.

  Mary, with her Victorian curls, would have been as out of place as a china doll in a speakeasy. And I, with my equally Victorian long hair that I refused to cut because Fred would have killed me, should have been out of place, too. I wondered, as I stepped away from the dancing to watch the youthful, vibrant actresses kick up their heels, if either I or Mary would survive this new, younger age. The truth was, we were already known as the sedate dinosaurs in the industry, those of us who had been around since the early or mid teens. How on earth could we keep up with dancing girls such as Bessie and Colleen Moore, girls who had grown up watching movies, worshipping stars like Mary Pickford? An entire generation was now invading Hollywood; a generation that didn’t remember a time before Charlie Chaplin wiggled his nose on-screen.

  A generation that had no idea how far we’d come, how hard we’d worked to pave the way.

  As I walked over to the gramophone, one of my knees creaked and I had to laugh. Lifting the needle off the record, I placed it at the beginning and cranked the handle again so the girls could keep dancing. I was definitely too old for this!

  A few days later, however, I discovered, to my amazement and joy, that I wasn’t as old as I’d thought, after all. And when I found out, who was the first person I had to tell (after Fred, of course)?

  Mary.

  It was always Mary.

  Mary hugged Fran as she walked her to the door; she held on tightly, feeling so noble, so generously expansive; feeling as if she’d just played the performance of her life, and Fran hadn’t suspected a thing.

  “Take care, Fran, dear! Let me know if you need anything—anything at all! We still have a lot of Gwynnie’s baby clothes and things. She’s almost ten now, so we don’t need them.”

  “Thank you, Squeebee! I have a feeling this is going to be the most spoiled baby in all of Hollywood!” Fran laughingly patted her still-flat stomach. “Louis B. Mayer and Sam Goldwyn both sent telegrams saying they want to be godfather. Although how they found out, I’m not quite sure.”

  “Louella. Louella Parsons. She knows everything. You know how these so-called journalists are, Fran. They’re highly paid gossips. Louella has every doctor in Hollywood on her payroll.”

  “I suppose. At least I got to tell you myself, Mary. And Fred—at least he heard it from me!”
<
br />   Laughing—looking lovelier than she ever had, softer, more radiant—Fran walked down the drive in that military way she had; she never strolled, she always marched, her heels punctuating the silence.

  Mary shut the door, relieved at first to have gotten through the scene without falling apart—and without disappointing Fran. But then she found herself trying to remember the first time she’d seen dear Fran. When was it? 1914? 1915? So many years ago! The door to the cutting room opened, and there had stood Frances Marion, obviously nervous but elegant, so poised and sophisticated. Mary had felt like a grubby little urchin, her hair in a towel, her hands scratched and dirty from the cutting machine. Owen had introduced them. She’d forgotten that! Well, that was one good thing he’d given her, at least.

  Mary’s stomach lurched, she tasted bile, and she rushed upstairs, ignoring the startled look of the doorman. Running down the wide hall, past colored framed photographs of her and Douglas in their most famous roles, she pushed open her bedroom door and slid on her knees to the toilet just in time. Holding her curls up, she retched into the bowl, then sat back, her forehead clammy, the room spinning. She sat like that for several minutes. Sympathy sickness, she thought with a drowsy smile. Sympathy, for what Fran was going through.

  Sympathy, for what she herself could never go through.

  Rising on shaky limbs, Mary walked over to the sink and splashed her face with cool water. Then she gazed at herself in the mirror—even though she’d installed soft, faintly pink lights in the bathroom, the most forgiving light there was, she still looked terrible, her skin blotchy, her eyes a little puffy—and spied the medicine cabinet on the wall behind her.

  She looked at the clock; it was only two in the afternoon. She had a rare day off, but Douglas was still at the studio. And he would be, for several more hours.

  Quickly she padded back out through her bedroom, shut the door, returned to the bathroom, and opened the medicine cabinet. She took out a large amber bottle, the kind that swabbing alcohol came in, and she crept back into her room. Settling herself among the pillows—so many! Douglas said too many, but in Mary’s mind she couldn’t have enough, not after years of sleeping on rolled-up newspapers—Mary kicked off her shoes, unbuckled her garters, and rolled her stockings down. She had the figure to wear the most extreme flapper fashions without any of the rubbery undergarments usually required, but Douglas still preferred her in more feminine clothes, with waists. “I like my wife to look like a woman,” he declared. And true, he had a taste for old-fashioned clothing; he hadn’t made a movie that wasn’t a costume picture in years. Although she also suspected that he liked showing off his muscular legs in tights.