“Oscars for Doorstops” The New York Times, May 18, 1997 ARCHEOLOGISTS in Kazakhstan recently dug up ancient females, buried with swords and shields, and speculated that perhaps these were the remains of the woman warriors of legend, the Amazons. The almost subversive thrill of this discovery is like what I felt after reading about Frances Marion and her female friends, an accomplished clique of powerful screenwriters, actresses, producers and directors who prospered within the inner sanctum of earliest Hollywood. Seventy years ago, these highly paid professionals were thriving in the movie business. That their professional descendants knew nothing
of their struggles and triumphs is remarkable. Actually, remarkably sad.
The images we had of our working grandmothers were vague: women with Lilly Dache hats, gossip columnists and gossips, clotheshorses competing with one another for men and work, backstabbers conversing in the cadences of ''The Women.'' To be sure, some of these women -- actresses like Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish, Marie Dressler and Marion Davies -- were known to us. But what we didn't know, and what Cari Beauchamp lovingly reveals, is that there were other women behind the scenes -- notably the screenwriters Anita Loos, Adela Rogers St. Johns and Bess Meredyth, and the directors Dorothy Arzner and Lois Weber -- who climbed to the very top of the Hollywood hierarchy. They wrangled with moguls like Louis B. Mayer, William Randolph Hearst and Joseph P. Kennedy. They learned from Irving Thalberg, and they leveraged one another into jobs and profit participation. This richly researched excavation of complex lives -- an almost scholarly tome (as scholarly as good movie gossip gets) -- reaches no overarching conclusions and has (thankfully) little dogma and no real axes to grind. But it is a revelation to those of us who came later. Frances Marion once remarked that she spent her life ''searching for a man to look up to without lying down.'' She was married three times, once to a man she truly adored, and counseled her girlfriends through marriages, divorces and affairs. She was born in San Francisco on Nov. 18, 1888, and became a reporter for The San Francisco Examiner by the time she was 22. On an important early assignment, Marie Dressler gave her an exclusive interview, and 16 years later she returned the favor by writing Dressler a career-saving role at MGM. Please pardon my almost schoolgirl-like crush of overidentification, but I, too, was given my first job as a producer by a woman, who has remained a friend and ally. If we've taken credit for the first ''power shower'' party (for Dawn Steel, the inimitable second-generation Hollywood mogul/mother, who was then the chairwoman of Columbia Pictures), well, Frances and her gang had weekly ''cat nights,'' featuring talk about martinis and men, business and pedicures, in the Beaux-Arts apartment that Hearst rented for his mistress, Marion Davies (another of Frances' pals). Mary Pickford, the first full-blown American movie star, was Frances Marion's best friend and collaborator. A female titan trapped in a baby-doll image, Pickford longed for autonomy and creative growth. At the height of her stardom, she came to understand her leverage, and with the help of her canny mother renegotiated her contract with Adolph Zukor, head of the Famous Players studio, to include a $40,000 signing bonus, $10,000 a week in salary and, for the first time ever, a percentage of the studio's profits. For her first film, Zukor hired Cecil B. DeMille to direct, and Pickford insisted that he hire Marion to write. Both men were appalled by the request, but Pickford wouldn't take no for an answer, and the moguls caved in. Pickford and Marion wrote, and on the set they improvised and reconceived in full creative control of their project. When the picture was cut, they excitedly screened it for a room full of male executives. Dead silence greeted the film. The picture was ''putrid'' and unreleasable, the men said, and the women were crushed. Finally, months later, the studio decided to release the picture anyway -- movie star releases being the rare, valuable things they still are -- and the critics and audiences adored the film, ''The Poor Little Rich Girl.'' The year was 1917. Pickford and Marion traveled incognito to visit the packed movie houses, but they were still mobbed. The women were transformed by the experience. Voicing the anthem of every film maker working in the studio system today, the women vowed that they would never again trust the reaction of a screening room full of suits. With the success of ''The Poor Little Rich Girl,'' Marion signed a screenwriting contract for a record $50,000 a year. From that moment until she was finally eclipsed by Ben Hecht in the mid-1930's, she was the highest-paid screenwriter in Hollywood. Ms. Beauchamp points out that in the 20's and 30's, over a quarter of the screenwriters working in Hollywood were women, and over a dozen women were working as directors. But then, as now, who's kidding whom? These women dressed their part (Anita Loos cultivated the innocent little girl look still so popular with today's D -- for development -- girls, who read and report on scripts), worked for longer hours than their male peers and giggled at story meetings. And by the late 1940's they were gone. Many, like Lois Weber, the first notable female director, died alone and forgotten. The others simply faded away. Marion loved some moguls, hated others. In the love category was her mentor, Irving Thalberg, who nurtured her talent and protected her through her years as doyenne of MGM. Even after he turned rich and bitter, and reviled her for her efforts to help found the Screen Writers Guild, she remained loyal to him, almost to a fault. Marion adored William Randolph Hearst, and was a frequent guest at San Simeon. But she did not enjoy anything about Louis B. Mayer, who was gruff, uneducated, overbearing and dishonest. Their relationship established a paradigm that continues to this day: the cigar-chomping bully with an accountant mentality battling it out with the refined, sensitive artiste. To the irritation of her male bosses, Marion used her Oscars as doorstops. ''You never did take the business serious enough,'' Mayer told her. You gotta love her for that. One of Marion's friends, Lenore Coffee, remarked about the studios: ''They pick your brains, break your heart, ruin your digestion -- and what do you get for it? Nothing but a lousy fortune.'' If the entry ticket to Hollywood was easier the first time around, it's partly because, as Ms. Beauchamp points out, no one else wanted in: screenwriting and movie making weren't yet considered serious careers, let alone respectable ones. Women could write in private, even in bed, and until Frances and her gang came along and founded the writers' union, no screen credits accrued to writers. Then came World War II. When men returned from the war, women were encouraged to leave the business. In 1937, Marion published ''How to Write and Sell Film Stories,'' her generous effort to share with future wannabes her experiences in the studio system. She decided that work had a different effect on women's lives than on those of her male colleagues: ''Women . . . reach out to others like plants to the sun, but men at work get swept into the vortex.'' Now, in a form of eternal recurrence, Hollywood is again a prosperous home to women: five are running studios, there are more female directors than I can count on two hands, and women as producers and screenwriters are so commonplace as to be finally unworthy of notice. When one of us gets sick or divorced or promoted, we all turn up, like sea mammals summoned by some ancient biological imperative, to protect and nurture one another. At the end of her life, Frances Marion said, ''I hope my story shows one thing -- how many women gave me real aid when I stood at the crossroads.'' |
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