Hollywood clout

Melanie Benjamin's novels tell life stories, covering many years, even entire lives, of real people, yet they are even more relationship stories: Alice Liddell's relationship with the odd man we know as Lewis Carroll in Alice I Have Been, Lavina Bump's relationship with P.T. Barnum in Mrs. Tom Thumb and so on. Now in her new novel, The Girls in the Picture, she explores the relationship of two female Hollywood pioneers, Mary Pickford and Frances Marion.

Pickford, Hollywood's first superstar, is best remembered today, but Marion was the screenwriter responsible for many of the actress's most important roles in silent films. Before Marion comes into her life, as Benjamin tells her story, Pickford as a member of an itinerant show business family had never had a friend or a childhood. Marion gives her both, the latter by creating roles that allows Pickford to play a child on the screen well into her adulthood.

So successful are they, especially after they make The Poor Little Rich Girl, that they become Hollywood rareties, women with power: the power to make their own movies, the power to sign big contracts, the power to put men like D.W. Griffith and Louis B. Mayer in their place. Life is lovely as Pickford marries Douglas Fairbanks and Marion marries Fred Thomson, an athlete and preacher whom she turns into a major cowboy star.

Yet changes come that impair their friendship. Marion resents the air of royalty that Pickford and Fairbanks adopt. Pickford resents Marion's ability to have children and her happy marriage after Fairbanks begins to stray. Thomson dies of tetanus and Pickford avoids the funeral. Sound comes to motion pictures, and while Marion becomes more successful than ever, winning two Oscars, Pickford grows too old to play young girls anymore and fails when playing more mature roles. And so the two friends drift apart.

As always, Benjamin sticks close to the truth, turning to fiction where the truth cannot be known. Private conversations can only be guessed at, and the author makes rational guesses. Did the two women reconcile in their old age as Benjamin imagines? We can only hope so.