The moment I’d set foot on the ship in New York and given my name and company, I had faced hostility. “CPI? To make movies? Stand aside, girlie, and let the real soldiers board first,” I’d been informed. The sergeant in charge pointed to a stool. “You can sit over there and knit.”
I had not gone over there to knit; I’d stubbornly remained where I stood, duffel bag across my aching shoulder, until he finally checked me off his list and assigned me a berth with a surly “Down with the other dames, near the kitchen where youse belong.”
“We didn’t ask you to come over, lady,” more than one orderly had growled at me whenever I asked the simplest things—where was the mess, what time was dinner, what lifeboat was I assigned to. How many times, since sailing, had a soldier asked me to bake a cake? Mend his uniform? Handed me a mop and expected me to clean up his mess? I didn’t argue or make a scene; I handed the mop back and went on my way. These were young men away from home for the very first time and headed to war. I needed to be understanding. Smile and move on and keep my head down.
Now I hoisted my heavy duffel bag over my shoulder and grabbed my satchel full of books—Lord, why had I packed so many?—and began to inch my way, in line with everyone else, slowly around the deck, toward the great gangplank miles, it seemed, away. Continually jostled, pushed and told to “get out of my way, lady,” I bit my tongue. All around me were men in uniform, which of course only made me think of Fred. Fred, tall and sure, possessive, unlike anyone I’d ever met before. Where was he now? Somewhere here in France, on a battlefield, most likely; I knew nothing specific from his heavily censored letters but still, I was suddenly filled with such desire for him—not lustful, simply the desire to touch him, to make sure he was still alive, still mine—that I stumbled, and fell against the man in front of me.
“Hey, lady, watch your step,” he grumbled. “Women! I don’t know what you’re doing here in a war but you ought to be back home, knitting scarves or canning preserves or something.”
Straightening my duffel bag, I glared at him and for the first time since boarding, I snapped.
“When I am back home, I’m hardly knitting scarves, young man!”
“Oh, really? What do you do? Go to tea parties? You look like the type.”
“I happen to write for the movies.”
“You do? Say, do you know Mary Pickford or maybe Chaplin?”
“Mary Pickford is my best friend.” And I grinned, triumphant, as a look of first disbelief, then wonder, then something almost like worship spread across his homely young face.
“What?” “You don’t say!” “Hey, Joe, come get a load of this!” Suddenly I was surrounded by a cluster of soldiers who had transformed into eager little boys, eyes shining, delighted smiles on their faces.
“Seriously, lady, you’re pals with Mary Pickford?”
“What’s she like?”
“Is she as pretty in person?”
“Is her hair really gold?”
“You write for the movies? Really?”
“Name one.”
“Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm,” I finally was able to answer.
“Oh!” so many of these manly men exclaimed, I had to laugh.
“Well, I went with the wife, you know,” one man admitted gruffly, and the others all nodded. “She loves Mary Pickford. She’d love to meet her.”
“Well, maybe she can someday,” I said. “Look me up in Hollywood when you get back. Frances Marion. Lieutenant Frances Marion.”
“Yes, ma’am! Lieutenant, ma’am!” In a flash, I was gallantly relieved of my duffel bag and escorted by officers down to the head of the line, where my passport was stamped and my military ID scrutinized.
“Goodbye, boys!” I waved at my new admirers, proud of myself and of the movies—and maybe a little triumphant. How many times would I have to trade on Hollywood in order to ease my passage? I’d had no idea it would make such a difference but I was glad I’d found it out.
Then my heart twisted; where would these sweet, star-struck boys be tomorrow?
I heard a boom in the distance and I ducked before I realized it couldn’t be a bomb or artillery shell. I was in Brest, for heaven’s sake. At least a hundred miles away from battle, although of course, a German plane could drop bombs anywhere. But now that I was here, I needed to find some kind of transportation to Paris, where I was to meet my superior officers at the CPI; I began to fumble through my satchel, searching for the letter with my instructions, when I heard my name.
“Frances! Frances—I knew you’d be here!”
Confused, I looked up, looked about, looked everywhere, for—
Fred.
He was here, he was lifting me off my feet, he was kissing me with an abandon I’d never known before; no longer the somber minister but a tall, wild soldier and I was kissing him back, laughing—crying.
“Fred! Oh, Fred—how did you…why did you…how on earth?”
“I had a premonition.” He set me down and took my hand with that lovely gentle possessiveness that thrilled my heart. “I had a feeling, you see. The Hundred Forty-third is stationed here in Brest and we got notice there was a troop ship docking today. That doesn’t happen very often. I thought, I bet Frances is on this ship. And you were. And so I was right!”
“You were!” Dizzy now—shivering with cold or something else and my letter a damp, crumpled mess in my hand—I swayed. “Fred, I’m afraid—is there a place we can sit down?”
With such surety—oh, to be with this man forever, this man who knew how to do everything important, who knew himself, who knew me—Fred grabbed my duffel bag with one hand and me with the other, steering us up a narrow path to a sheltered bench. We collapsed, and I blew out a shaky breath, relieved I hadn’t fainted away like some ridiculous maiden.
“Fred, I don’t know what to say…During the crossing, I’d about convinced myself that we are all wrong for each other, that I had to write you and tell you that you were too good for me, that I could never deserve—this. You.”
“I would have torn that letter up, Frances Marion. And run you down to the ends of the earth to find you and tell you what a beautiful little fool you are.”
“You found me here, in all—this! How, I have no idea—do you know, if I’d written this in a scenario, no one would believe it? But they’d love it anyway. The public does love a romance, an improbable romance. Maybe I will have to use this, you know…I can imagine a scenario for Mary, she plays a Red Cross nurse, she’s in love with a soldier, but she vows to give him up because of her past, and then he meets her, just like this, and…”
“Frances, oh, Frances!” Fred laughed, so exuberantly that soldiers turned to stare. “This is why I love you! You never stop, your mind is always spinning and creating. But, darling, I need to make one thing clear. Please don’t use our life together in your work. That’s ours, it’s sacred. I understand I’ll always have to share you with Hollywood, and with Mary. But what’s between us, every day—every minute—that’s ours. Do you promise?”
“Yes, dear.” I blushed; I’d never spoken so demurely before and I’d certainly never called him “dear.” But I understood; a man as sure of himself as Fred was a man who could afford to make compromises, where other—lesser—men felt they could not. Still, a man like Fred was also naturally private, especially in matters of the heart. I would give him that privacy; I would dignify our love, consecrate it, with my silence. It would always be apart from my work. And it would be more important than work—that, I vowed. Oh, I would never give up my career, not even for Fred, and it was easy to say that because I knew he would never ask me to. But in order to make a marriage succeed—and for the first time I understood something I hadn’t been willing to in my previous attempts—you had to put it first.
“Now what?” I was happy. Content to sit beside my—my—lieutenant in the gray drizzle of a French day, under the dripping eaves of a tipsy tin shed.
“Now, we both do our part.”
An
d I was back to reality; the thought of having to say goodbye to Fred again, after this unexpected—holy—reunion nearly killed me. But I mustn’t let him see.
“When do you go?”
“To the front? Who knows? I can get leave to join you in Paris for a day or two, but then I’ll have to report back. When do you?”
“Who knows?” We laughed, and it was perfect.
“I would have to have fallen in love with a suffragette. A militant suffragette.”
“I suspect you secretly admire suffragettes.”
Fred guffawed. “Don’t tell my mother, but heaven help me, I do. Especially when they have blue eyes and a turned-up nose and a very busy brain.”
“Why, Fred?” Now I was struck by the brevity of our time together, the enormity of what lay ahead for both of us. “Why me?” I hungered for answers to questions I’d not allowed myself to ask. “On paper, we’re as unlike as two people could be. I’m all wrong for you. You’re all wrong for me. So why? Why me?”
“Because of your shoes.”
“What?” I was dizzy again, utterly confused. “My shoes?”
“Your shoes,” Fred continued with a confident—cocky on anyone else but him—grin. “When you met me in the hospital, one of your shoes was unbuttoned. I could tell it bothered you—you kept trying to hide that foot with your other one, and sometimes you almost bent down like you were going to fix it, but each time you would stop yourself. I could tell you were aching to. But you never did, and I thought it was because you felt that wouldn’t be ladylike. And I loved you for that—your self-control, your femininity, how that one little thing bothered you so much, but still you never gave in to it.”
“I had no idea you noticed! I would have died if I thought you had—I wanted to be perfect in front of you because you were so perfect! Even in a hospital bed, you looked like a Greek god, completely unfazed that you were in a gown, and I was all dolled up.”
“Now it’s your turn. Why me?”
“Because—” I was suddenly shy and I looked away; all around us was chaos—soldiers were tramping, shouting, dragging bags and trunks, lorries honking, whistles blowing, that damned “Over There!” wheezing from a harmonica. I didn’t like to remind Fred of my past; that he knew and didn’t care was enough. But he deserved an answer. “Because you’re unlike any man I’ve ever met. Because for the first time, I don’t feel as if I have to give up any part of myself to love you. Or to be loved by you.”
“That’s a beautiful speech, Miss Marion,” Fred said seriously, even as his eyes gleamed. “Do you mind if I use it in a movie?”
“Oh!” I hung my head. “I promise, Fred, I won’t ever do that. I won’t ever use anything you say, or anything real between us. I promise.”
“You know I love that you’re a career woman, don’t you? I love that you have your own identity apart from mine. My first wife—Laura—was, well…” Fred swallowed, and I steeled myself; he’d scarcely talked about his late wife, and I wasn’t sure I wanted him to, even as I was almost torn apart by curiosity and, shamefully, jealousy.
“Laura was lovely. Fragile. Devoted. The most beautiful person, inside and out, I’ve ever known. But her entire life was wrapped up in me, in being a preacher’s wife, and it was a little stifling. I’m not the kind of person who likes to bring his work home with him; I like home to be a haven, an escape. But with Laura, I was always the minister. And very rarely, simply—me. Fred. But don’t get me wrong, I loved her. I mourn her. You have to know that.”
“I do.” I took his hand. “If you didn’t, I would have doubts about you. And I don’t. Not a single one.”
“Well.” Fred pulled me to my feet, putting an end to this particular conversation. I consulted my watch; it was nearly 3:00 P.M. and I had to get to Paris by nightfall. I was also bone tired; I’d not been able to sleep well on the ship with all the fear of being blown to smithereens by a torpedo (we slept in our day clothes, in case we had to abandon ship in the middle of the night). The air had been too close in my tiny, shared cabin; my roommates snored. And then there had been the unceasing roiling in my stomach as I’d sped toward the unknown.
But seeing Fred had eased the roiling, if only for now. And I longed to bathe properly in a real tub, not a washstand, and sleep in an actual bed, not just a thin cot. So I stood and—hand in hand with my beloved—I picked my way among the debris of humanity that had washed ashore in France. American soldiers, all. Ready to go to war.
I was one of them. The only woman swimming upstream in a river of men.
—
Later, the only thing I would allow myself to write, or speak, seriously about was the shoes.
It was odd, I knew; I’d come to war for a lot of reasons, one of which, if I were being honest, was to gain experience; experience to write about. Because that’s what writers did; they lived, then they wrote about that living.
But during an entire lifetime of writing—writing movies, writing books about movies, novels, essays, articles—I never really wrote about the war, and my time in France. Not in a significant way.
Oh, sure, I’d tell people about the surprise of seeing American soldiers hungrily watching movies played on huge white sheets in their barracks; of seeing firsthand the popularity of movies, how they could distract, soothe troubled minds and hearts and damaged bodies. To my surprise, Doug and Charlie Chaplin were the soldiers’ absolute favorites, not Mary Pickford. But of course, these were men. Doughboys.
I’d laugh and make fun of my own poor French and my absurd attempts to speak it. I’d reveal my delight in how popular Fred was among these men when we got to Paris. In Hollywood, I was the celebrity—nothing like Mary, but still, I was known and, more important, people wanted to know me. But in Paris, hordes of men clamored for a look at or a handshake from Fred Thomson, the great athlete.
I did write to Mary about the obstacles I encountered, time and time again, from the men, officers and soldiers both. The war makers who felt that a woman among them was an aberration of nature. Men who openly questioned my mission, my intelligence, even my femininity. Men who assumed I was there for one purpose only.
“Hey, girlie, be in my room at ten o’clock,” one doctor in an Army hospital barked after barely glancing at me in a hallway. “I’ll give you what you came over here for.”
Men who would grow darkly angry, even physically threatening—an orderly once shoved me against a wall when I tartly explained that my orders did not include him; thank God several officers happened to come around the corner before he could do more.
I was not the only woman treated this way, and I would always praise to the heavens the women I encountered in France—the nurses, in particular. I was eager to relate their stories even as I was unable to talk about mine. It was a privilege to witness and share their sacrifices, how the wounded looked at them with a peculiar, devoted light in their eyes, not just as women who could alleviate their suffering but as holy women—Everywoman, in a way. Virgin, Mother, Sweetheart, Lover, Eve.
After I bid Fred a tearful goodbye in Paris, clinging to him until the very last and feeling as if gravity itself had disappeared as he walked away, I dried my eyes, powdered my nose, and reported to duty. I was given a canteen and a utility belt and assigned a cameraman, Harry Thorpe, and a director, Wesley Ruggles, and we went to work recording these remarkable women on film. Women who weren’t only nurses; women who rode bicycles bearing telegrams to the front lines. Women who ran the canteens. Women who showed the films for entertainment. As my crew and I traveled back and forth from Paris to the front—never all the way to the trenches; our orders allowed us to go no farther than the field hospitals—we filmed these women soothing, laughing, writing letters. Covering bodies with sheets. Arranging for burials. Packing away personal effects into little boxes to be sent back home, this last act always done so tenderly, no matter how busy the nurse might be, no matter how little sleep or food she might have had in the last thirty-six hours. And always, a handwritten lette
r went into that box, inventing an intimacy with the dead soldier so the grieving loved ones wouldn’t think their son or husband had died alone.
So I filmed the horrors of war, and tried to do so unblinkingly, striving not to allow myself to be caught up personally in the moment—it was as if the camera shielded me from emotional involvement, or at least, that’s what I told myself. If something hit me particularly hard, like the soldier who wept for hours before he finally died of his wounds because he didn’t have anyone at home who would remember him, I somehow managed to stifle my own sobs, taking refuge in the work, pretending that I was filming a scene with actors, a scene I had written and so could yell “Cut!” when it was over. That helped, quite a lot. To pretend that I was on a set and not an actual battlefield.
But at night, when I was alone in my small hotel room or in whatever tent I was assigned if I remained at the front, I wept, quietly, so as not to disturb anyone.
Always I was looking for images, trying to see my surroundings as someone would in a movie theater, where the only sounds would be piano music. The images were everything; the dirt, the scars, so many of the men with bandaged eyes from the gas; men and women mingling, striving, suffering, until gender, at least here in the real battle lines, was of no importance. They were all simply people, caught up in hell. And yet managing, if they were well enough, to flash a smile whenever they saw the camera turned their way. I couldn’t get over how the camera affected people, even people who were suffering; it turned them all into aspiring movie stars. The soldiers especially would clown about and imitate Chaplin’s Little Tramp, using their forefingers to mimic his mustache, their rifles to imitate his cane, and I’d be struck anew by how universal my world was, how what we did on a soundstage in Hollywood could travel across the ocean to the battlefields of France.
What my crew and I couldn’t convey on film, but which were no less paramount and horrific, were the sounds. The sobs, the pleadings, the wails of despair; the grim, accepting silences. The incessant tinkling of bloodied operating instruments into tin basins in the hospitals; even at night, far from the wards, my ears rang from that sound. The never-ending crunch of gravel by heavy boots. The accordion music on every corner, in every café and canteen, in Paris. The desperate, high-pitched laughter there. The lack of it at the front. The constant low hum of voices; someone was always talking, ordering, asking, begging. Never once did I hear a bird chirp, except in Paris.