Frances Marion and Marijuana

After writing an obituary for Judy Balaban, who tried LSD back in the day when Cary Grant was doing it, and co-wrote an article interviewing Grant’s wife Betsy Drake and others for Vanity Fair in 2010, I looked up her co-author  Cari Beauchamp, a film historian currently at the Mary Pickford Foundation. 

Beauchamp’s book: “Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood” details Marion’s illustrious career during the years of the Fatty Arbunkle trial etc. and the coming of the Hays code.

After Marion (who was also a painter and sculptor) painted a portrait of actress Kitty Gordon showing off her much-admired back to promote Peg O’ My Heart, posters for the play were vandalized and leaflets signed by “Conscientious Citizens" went out shouting, “We must protect our innocent little children from seeing such pictures of half-nude women. And we keep them away from the evil influence of the nickelodeons and the lawless people who have forced themselves upon our beautiful city to make what they call movies. Only if we all unite can we drive them out.” Marion and a friend attended a meeting of the group, dubbing them “The Constipated Citizens.” (p. 27). 

Marijuana is mentioned twice in the book: 

While Marion was working with actress Alma Rubens on The Masks of the Devil (1928), Rubens’s “drifting speech and glassy eyes betrayed the drug addiction that had taken hold of her. Frances believed that 'a great deal could be written in defense of studio players who become addicted, first to sleeping pills which they are assured are harmless, then to stimulants to offset the deadening effects of narcotics.’…[Wallace] Reid’s death at the age of 31 in 1923 had shocked the film colony, but while his wife devoted her life to a public fight against drugs, Frances saw “the scores of Blackmarketeers who would cut their mother’s throats for profit” continue to thrive and noted that “Benzedrine and marijuana are as accessible as gumdrops.” (p. 223)

After WWII began, Marion’s domestic staff went to work for Lockheed, and she hired the “older Mexican couple" Amado and Concha Salazar to take their place. When rifles she bought her sons for Christmas resulted in dents in Amado’s truck, police followed him back to Marion's house "with a one-hundred-yard driveway and metal gate.” She translated Amado’s Spanish and satisfied the police that her sons’ shooting range had caused the bullet holes. “As they started to leave, the police noticed some strange-looking plants behind the garage and told Frances they were sorry, but they would have to take her into the station and arrest her for her large crop of marijuana.” She was soon sprung by her lawyer, and her sons were surprised that, “Mother thought it was all very funny and provided her with an experience she never would have had otherwise.” (pp. 350-351).

Marion adapted the Eleanor Gates play “Poor Little Rich Girl” for Pickford in 1917. According to Wikipedia, the trippy plot goes: 

Gwendolyn is an 11-year-old girl who is left by her rich and busy parents to the care of unsympathetic domestic workers at the family's mansion. One day, she becomes sick because the maid has given her an extra dose of sleeping medicine to be able to go out. She then becomes delirious and starts seeing an imaginary world inspired by people and things around her; the Garden of Lonely Children in the Tell-Tale forest. Her conditions worsen and Death tries to lure her to eternal rest. But Life also appears to her and finally wins.  

In an attempt to broaden the big-theatre appeal of the “woman’s picture” Stella Dallas (1925), Marion wrote a “delirium sequence for a drunken Ed Munn, played by Jean Hersholt, with flies and bees followed by monkeys and elephants all coming through the keyhole to haunt him.” The scene was cut after it terrified audiences, and the film became Goldwyn’s highest grossing picture to date, bringing in over a million dollars. (p. 171-2).

Frances Marion wrote over 200 scripts between 1916-1946 and was the first person to twice win an Academy Award. She served as the first vice president and only woman board member of the Writer’s Guild (in defiance of Irving Thalberg). She published a memoir Off With Their Heads: A Serio-Comic Tale of Hollywood in 1972 and died the following year. Her son Frederick earned a PhD in English at Yale, taught there and later joined the faculty of the University of North Carolina. He became an editor of the writings of George Eliot, publishing editions of "Felix Holt, the Radical" in 1980 and later. 

Uma Thurman narrated a film based on "Without Lying Down," in which Beauchamp is interviewed along with female filmmakers like Fay Kanin (Teacher's Pet) and 2017 Tokin' Woman of the Year Kathy Bates voicing Marion.