Without Lying Down. Cari Beauchamp

Young and old were dying of the disease after only a few days of being afflicted. Her dear New York friend, the composer Felix Arndt, who had written Nola for his wife and Marionette for Frances, was gone at the age of twenty-two. Adela Rogers St. Johns’s beloved new stepmother had died as well. No one escaped being touched in one way or another.³⁶

      Frances recovered, yet for a time it looked as if Fred Thomson might be home before her. Then on December 7, the day before the first contingent of the 143rd were to board the ship for the States, he received word from the General Headquarters that he was being detached from his regiment and named the chaplain of the Bordeaux embarkation camp. He was to remain for at least six more months and be the coordinating officer for all their educational, recreational, and religious activities. Before taking effect, the assignment allowed an extended leave in Paris and he arranged to meet Frances before her departure.³⁷

      As Frances sat in the crowded lobby of the Ritz Hotel waiting for Fred, boisterous Americans dominated the throngs of people almost desperate to celebrate. She watched “the hunting pack out for the kill” as two Frenchwomen moved in on a tall American army captain and a shorter young man in an Italian uniform. As the captain glanced in her direction, Frances locked eyes with Bosworth’s cinematographer George Hill. He said something quickly to his friend and came over to join her.

      “I heard you were in France, but I’ve been stationed in Italy ever since I arrived in Europe,” George said as he sat down next to her. “Somebody told me you were going to marry a sky pilot. Is that true?”

      He asked it with such incredulity that Frances laughed out loud as she nodded yes.

      “A preacher’s wife,” George said, shaking his head in bewilderment. “I can’t quite see you in that role.”

      Frances assured him he would understand when he met Fred, who should be arriving soon, and as they waited, they traded war stories mixed with news from home. His Italian friend was still entertaining the two young women and George waved to him to join them.³⁸

      “You’ll get a great kick out of this chap. He’s the wildest coot in the Italian flying corps. He cracked up so many of their planes we called him the Austrian Ace.”

      “Does he speak English?” Frances asked in a whisper as the young man walked toward them.

      “Speak English? He’s American. His name is Walter Wanger.”

      Within minutes, Walter and Frances were comparing notes on their San Francisco childhoods and determining how their families might have known each other. His father, Sigmund Feuchtwanger, had been a successful clothes manufacturer, but Walter’s mother changed the family name to Wanger after his father’s death. Walter had gone off to Dartmouth and independently produced several plays, but was becoming intrigued by the movie business and wanted to work in Hollywood after the war.³⁹

      Frances was fascinated by this multifaceted charmer and, inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to anyone from San Francisco, volunteered to give him letters of introduction to Lasky and Zukor. Walter was holding her hand in thanks just as Fred Thomson walked though the door.

      Introductions were made and Fred and George, both well over six feet, dwarfed Frances and Walter. The two men stayed and talked for another half hour before Fred and Frances were finally alone.

      “I liked your friend Captain Hill very much, but where did you pick up that American imposter who was holding your hand when I arrived?” Frances explained the situation, but while he and George would become close friends, Fred never did have much patience for the showman Walter Wanger.

      Fred and Frances spent Christmas together in Paris and with prewar guidebooks in hand, they visited Versailles, Napoleon’s tomb, and all the other tourist attractions. They welcomed in the new year of 1919 and in early February, she boarded the transport ship the Baltic and headed for New York.⁴⁰

      Chapter 8

      Frances was greeted at the dock by reporters eager to hear her war stories. The reception had been arranged by Pete Smith, the Famous Players Lasky publicity man she had known when he was promoting Bosworth films. Frances used the opportunity to champion the talents of Wesley Ruggles and Harry Thorpe yet found it difficult to articulate the war’s devastation.

      “What may come as an aftermath of all I saw and experienced is more than I can say right now, but when I think of all the scenes I witnessed, I realize how helpless I am, or would be, in attempting to include any of it in a scenario.”¹

      She was anxious to put the war behind her, catching up with old friends like Anita Loos and meeting new ones like the Vanity Fair drama critic Dorothy Parker. She also ran into Elda Furry, or Hedda Hopper, as she was now calling herself, and they laughed about their hostile meeting years before during the filming of The Battle of Hearts. Several friends including Elsie Janis had told them both separately how much they would enjoy each other and they soon admitted their friends knew better than they did.

      Hedda was a natural storyteller and she laughed as easily at herself as she did at others. She amused Frances with tales of her Quaker girlhood outside Altoona, Pennsylvania, and her marriage to the much older Broadway star De Wolf Hopper. She was “Wolfie’s” fifth wife and he kept calling her by their names: Ella, Ida, Edna, or Nella. The artist Neysa McMein suggested she see her numerologist, and by combining dates and numbers, the seer arrived at the name Hedda. Wolfie was less than enthusiastic, but he never called her by the wrong name again.²

      Hedda was thirty-four, the mother of a four-year-old son, and was already starting to drop several years from her age. Frances could be cynical while Hedda crossed the line into judgmental, but they laughed without inhibition and Frances enjoyed Hedda’s rapier wit and even tolerated her constant flow of unsolicited advice. She had found a new friend who made her, even at her most honest, sound demure.³

      After three weeks of vacationing in New York, Frances took the train west, stopping in Chicago to interview the heads of the several war relief organizations for her film. American Women in the War was soon released to exhibitors as a serial in fifteen reels.⁴

      Frances’s first order of business after checking into the Hollywood Hotel was to see Mary. They had written often, but six months was a long time between face-to-face conversations, especially for best friends used to seeing each other every day.

      Mary’s affair with Doug Fairbanks had intensified and rumors were rampant. While they were still trying to keep their relationship a secret, Owen Moore knew exactly what was happening. Already resentful of what he saw as Doug’s “instant stardom,” Owen’s drinking and mood swings escalated to the point that he threatened to kill both Mary and “that climbing monkey.” Fairbanks cavalierly told his director Allan Dwan, “Your friend Owen Moore says he’s going to shoot me, if he’s sober enough to point the gun,” but he took the threat seriously enough to go to Arizona for a month to make A Modem Musketeer and even looked into the possibility of going to South America to make a film or two.⁵

      While he knew his own marriage was a sham, Doug so hated confrontations that he kept the telegraph wires busy with cables to Beth professing his love and denying any problems. She had remained blind to the affair; Doug’s busy schedule and her preference for New York over California made her fairly easy to manipulate, yet slowly her suspicions grew. During one of her California visits, Doug took off with Mary, thinking Beth was lunching with Hedda Hopper. Their friendship had developed when both their husbands were on Broadway and Beth had helped Hedda find a house when the Hoppers arrived in Hollywood. The two women often took walks together and this afternoon they wandered past Doug’s brother’s bungalow. The puritanical Hedda had seen Mary and Doug sneak into the house for assignations before and while she would never approve of such affairs, she wasn’t going to be the one to tell Beth. To avoid any possible encounters, Hedda told her the canyon was infested with rattlesnakes and rerouted their walks from then on.⁶

      Doug feared facing the