Cari Beauchamp,
Without Lying Down. Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood.
Berkeley: University of California Press. 1997
ISBN 0520214927
475pp
$US 17.95 (pb)
Uploaded 1 July 1999

Biography is a significant mode of narrating Hollywood history. It is also a significant mode of writing new players into standard film histories. The creative role of women behind the scenes in Hollywood has been an issue for feminist film history since the rediscovery of women directors, Dorothy Arzner and Ida Lupino in the 1970s. Cari Beauchamp’s meticulously documented biography of the screenwriter Frances Marion (born Marion Benson Owens to a San Francisco society family in 1888) focuses on the changing fortunes of women in the Hollywood industry from 1912 until 1946. In her weighty biography, Beauchamp draws on an extensive archive of written and oral sources to flesh out the life story of Frances Marion, Hollywood’s most highly paid screenwriter (male or female) from 1917 until the 1930s. Marion’s career was broadly sketched in Script Girls, Lizzie Francke’s 1994 survey of women screenwriters working in Hollywood from the silent era until the present. Like Francke, Beauchamp is keen to locate Marion within a unique social milieu of women writers, actors, producers and occasional directors who constituted a liberated (yet volatile) milieu shaped by a burgeoning (though disreputable) industry. Although a feminist ethos informs both books, Beauchamp’s study is devoted to piecing together a mosaic of women’s life stories insofar as they contribute to a detailed, celebratory picture of Frances Marion whose name Beauchamp had initially come across in the autobiographies of Anita Loos, Adela Rogers St John, Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish.

Paving the way for Beauchamp’s biography of an individual writer and her milieu, Francke’s series of case studies of Hollywood’s women screenwriters has a broadly political agenda: ‘to give the debates about women working in the film industry some sort of socio-historical perspective.’ When Francke points to the women screenwriters behind classics, including Gilda (Virginia Van Upp), The Big Sleep (Leigh Brackett), and Bringing up Baby (Hagar Wilde), she celebrates their achievements and, at the same time, investigates the sexual politics of the Hollywood industry. By focusing on a number of case histories selected to exemplify different periods, Francke poses the double-sided question: how have different production modes facilitated women’s access to filmmaking through scriptwriting; and how have women scriptwriters made a difference to both ‘women’s pictures’ and other classical Hollywood genres. The impulse driving this feminist research derives from an acute sense of women’s dubious offscreen status as bit-players in an industry which thrives on women’s onscreen status as spectacular objects of male fear and desire. These questions are implicit in Beauchamp’s study of Frances Marion and the network of women (and prominent men) who supported her career and benefited from the longevity of her success.

The prologue to Beautchamp’s biography pinpoints Academy awards night, 5 November 1930, as the culmination of Marion’s career. On that night Marion won the screenwriting award for her innovative prison film, The Big House. However, in Beauchamp’s view the night belonged to Marion in a more expansive sense – Marion’s screenwriting credit appeared on films nominated in seven out of the eight award categories. Furthermore, Marion’s influential hand was evident in the careers of award winning actors (Mary Pickford, Greta Garbo, Norma Shearer, Marie Dressler), directors (George Cukor) and producers Louis B. Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn, Irving Thalberg) seated in the audience. Leading up to this night, the first two-thirds of Without Lying Down is devoted to a carefully documented account of: Marion’s liberal youth in San Francisco where she attended the prestigious Mark Hopkins Art Institute; two early marriages before her apprenticeship years began in earnest in 1914 under the patronage of Lois Weber and other mentors including Adela Rogers, Mary Pickford and Herbert Bosworth; her assignment on the Western front at the end of World War I and her consequent marriage to athlete/pastor/actor Fred Thompson (with whom she had one son and adopted another before Thompson’s early death) and a later, short-lived marriage to cinematographer/director George Hill; and the consolidation of her highly paid career from as early as 1917 when Marion returned from a stint in New York to write scenarios for Mary Pickford, going on to earn an unprecedented salary of $2000 per week from a variety of sources including William Randolph Hearst and Irving Thalberg at MGM.

By the time Beauchamp’s chronological narrative arrives at the 1930 Academy Awards evening with Marion at the peak of her influence in Hollywood, two consistent themes have emerged: Marion’s diplomacy and networking skills which she used to advance her own career and promote the cause of friends, colleagues, husbands and lovers, a pattern which would last until her twenty-year association with MGM finally drew to a close in 1946; the second theme is the pitting of the screenwriter against the Hays office and other censorship forces, including the Blacklist, in order to defend Hollywood’s repertoire from anti-vice campaigners. Before she was presented with her Academy Award in 1930, Marion was had to endure an hour-long speech from Joseph Breen (from the Hays office), a joyless reminder of the political manoeuvring required to ensure the passage of some of her 325 scripts onto the screen. Marion’s first screenplay for Thalberg was an adaptation of The Scarlet Letter (1926) from Hawthorne’s classic novel which was blacklisted by the Hays office. With Lillian Gish committed to the project, it was up to Marion, Thalberg and the Hays office to pre-empt potential critics of the film by involving them from an early stage. The outcome was different in 1927 when Marion wrote an Irish comedy, The Callahans and the Murphys, as a comeback vehicle for her impecunious friend, Marie Dressler. Irish groups, the Catholic church and local censorship boards came down so heavily on the film that it was eventually taken out of distribution. Beaucahmp goes to great lengths to demonstrate that the compromises that characterise Marion’s screenwriting career have to be understood in the light of routine audience testing and the constant need to appease censorious groups as well as interfering studio heads, particularly Louis B. Mayer. By implication, Marion’s ability to flourish under these conditions is the true measure of her career.

However, what’s missing from Beauchamp’s engrossing account of Hollywood personalities embroiled in studio politics is a sense of Frances Marion, the screenwriter. Although Beauchamp includes an exhaustive filmography and bibliography as well as a useful index, there is no attempt to pinpoint the motivation, style, or voice which might unify Marion’s prolific output and account for her pre-eminence in an era which featured many exceptional women (and their mothers) in Hollywood. Although Marion wrote for a pantheon of women stars, including Pickford, Gish, Garbo, Dressler, the Talmadge sisters, Jean Harlow and Marion Davies, her career encompassed such a diversity of projects that perhaps Beauchamp had little choice but to find consistency only in Marion’s intelligent flexibility, wry composure, self-deprecating humour and fierce loyalty to friends, as well as her exquisite wardrobe, notorious ‘hen parties’ and life-long cultivation of languages, the piano and sculpting. Ultimately, Beauchamp forgoes critical evaluation of Marion’s screenplays in favour of a classic historical biography which focuses on the available documents to substantiate a detailed account of a working life in Hollywood. A measure of Beauchamp’s success with the genre is the effortless interweaving of life stories which reveal many of the forces that shaped the careers of early Hollywood’s ‘powerful women’.

Felicity Collins

References:

Lizzie Francke, Script Girls: Women Screenwriters in Hollywood . London: British Film Institute, 1994.