Frances had also noticed their young son playing in the lobby, but neither of his parents was the type of person she was naturally drawn to; Douglas literally jumped over the sofas in the foyer and she saw “no spark of life” in Beth, whose very existence seemed to revolve totally around her husband.16
Even by his own standards, Doug was particularly animated at Elsie’s and with a hearty “Hello,” he shook Frances’s hand so hard she thought her arm might come out of its socket. With a deep bow, he presented himself to Mary and Owen and she complimented him on The Lamb, which she had just seen at the Knickerbocker. Doug may have been used to the spotlight, but he was not so egocentric that he failed to notice Owen’s almost disdainful treatment of Mary, who was so clearly worshiped by everyone else in the room.
Elsie had known the Fairbankses from years on the road, sharing a history of overlapping performances and parties. She found Beth sweet, but a bit foolish for spending all her time “proving that to her the world was Douglas Fairbanks and Douglas Fairbanks was the world.” Frances thought that Elsie was acting as “awestruck as a little girl” in front of Doug, but even she had to admit Fairbanks was “the type of man who makes you look in the mirror.” In fact, Elsie had been rather openly nursing what she called a longtime “pash” for Doug and seeking to get him off alone, she asked for volunteers to go for a walk.17
Mary Pickford remembered the incident somewhat differently. She thought Elsie had been overtly flirting with every man in the room all afternoon and when she came bounding up to the group and said “Come on, Doug, Come on, Owen, Let’s the three of us go for a walk,” Mary was appalled. Almost as an afterthought, Elsie turned to Mary and Beth and said, “You girls don’t mind if I steal your husbands for a few minutes.”
Mary had already caught Owen in compromising situations with several women, including Elsie, and while she may not have wanted him herself, that didn’t mean anyone else could have him. Mary turned to Beth and said, “Let’s go for a walk too. We’re not going to let her get away with that.”
Beth went with Mary down the back hillside, but the bouncing, athletic Elsie had already determined that the steep inclines over her eleven acres, combined with the slippery logs that were the only bridge over the rolling Pocantico River, would discourage all but Doug and Owen. Beth quickly decided it was too cold and wet and turned back, but Mary, who could not have been dressed less appropriately for a hike in a tight black velvet skirt, white satin blouse, and white kid boots, was not to be deterred. When Elsie pointed out that she would ruin her new boots, Mary shouted back, “What’s a pair of shoes compared to losing a husband?”18
The stubborn streak that served her so well in negotiations came to the fore and Mary scrambled down the hill, but the threesome was so far ahead of her they were soon in the woods. As she was halfway across the logs that forged the river, she froze in panic. Suddenly Doug reappeared at her side and asked permission to carry her.
“Please do,” said Mary, taken aback by the pure chivalry of the gesture as she was literally swept up in his arms. It was something she had not seen in real life for some time.
The four of them walked the rest of the way together and Elsie, resigned to the situation, noted, “The Russian boots were ruined but Mr. Fairbanks and Miss Pickford had become Douglas and Mary by the time we dragged our weary bodies home.”19
That same November of 1915, Equitable finally released A Daughter of the Sea, based on the story “The Fisher Girl” that Frances had sold before coming to New York. Her name was mentioned in the press as the original author and it received mixed reviews. One critic said the plot lacked depth and “fails to stir,” but she was so involved at World that words that would have crushed her only months earlier didn’t faze her now.
She had quickly risen in prominence at the studio and they depended on her to write most of the films for Clara Kimball Young and Alice Brady, the two stars around whom World “block booked” all their movies to exhibitors. Frances tried not to be intimidated by adapting classics like Alexandre Dumas’s La Dame aux Camélias into Camille for Clara Kimball Young and joked about avoiding cliché titles like “Camille is coughing much better this morning.”
Frances stayed close to the original story for Camille and laughed that Clara looked healthy enough to “enter the Olympics” though she was supposed to be dying of tuberculosis on the screen. Paul Capellani, who had played Armand in Sarah Bernhardt’s Camille on the Paris stage, repeated his role, and if there was any implication drawn that Clara was the same caliber actress as Bernhardt, so much the better. Clara was under personal contract to Lewis Selznick and he carefully orchestrated her publicity, reporting she had “braved the wards of hospitals” to conduct a detailed study of tuberculosis.20
In spite of Selznick’s heavy prose and his promotion of her as the aloof “Mona Lisa type,” Frances knew Clara rarely spoke in words of more than two syllables or spent even a day studying for a role. Fun-loving to a fault, Clara called Selznick “Old Smellstick” and resisted his attempts to keep her under wraps, wondering out loud what was the use of having all this money if she couldn’t live life as she pleased. She told Frances that Camille was a dull role: “All I’ve got to do is cough, kiss a guy named Armand who’s supposed to be French, cough, kiss the same guy again, then kick the bucket.”21
Clara was a child of a theatrical family; her grandfather was the great English actor John Kemble and her parents had married on a New York stage after a performance. Clara was playing along with them by the age of three and when she signed with Vitagraph in 1911, she had performed in over half the states in the union. By her own estimation she had appeared in over one hundred films when she starred in My Official Wife, and it was such a box office smash that a bidding war for her services resulted; Lewis J. Selznick and World were the winners.22
Like Mary Pickford, Clara’s star had ascended while those around her remained static, but lacking Mary’s work ethic and her passion to succeed, Clara was happy to sit back and just enjoy the benefits of her fame. Her parents came with her to World, as did her husband of two years, James Young, a fairly successful Broadway actor, and Frances found the similarity between their relationship and Mary’s and Owen’s disheartening.23
The original stories and adaptations Frances wrote for Clara were usually designed around her dark-haired beauty: a Russian Jewish singer in The Yellow Passport and a Cuban aristocrat in The Feast of Life. She shared Clara’s boredom with the heavy melodramas, but with a week to turn out a two-reeler and only slightly more to write longer films, the stories tended to blur together. Still, she was disappointed when Selznick would not allow Clara to branch out even after another dark-haired beauty with languid eyes, the accomplished Russian stage actress Alla Nazimova, was added to the stable.
Selznick prided himself on his ability to sell and claimed, “I pick actors for their looks,” but that philosophy was close to blasphemy to William Brady. He believed actors should be trained in speaking their lines, even if they weren’t actually heard, and told Selznick he was wrong to typecast Clara in heavy costume dramas because he was convinced that a long and prosperous career could be built only on playing a variety of roles. Yet those costume melodramas guaranteed money at the box office and Selznick saw no reason to alter the recipe for success.
Frances enjoyed writing scenarios like Then I’ll Come Back to You and Tangled Fates for World’s other major star, Alice Brady, because “she could play anything, tears or laughter, modern or period; there were few actresses comparable to Alice.”24
Alice had been only three years old when her mother, the French dancer Rose Marie René, died. William Brady married the actress Grace George shortly thereafter and young Alice was sent to be educated at the Convent of St. Elizabeth in Madison, New Jersey, before entering the