Female Trouble

Among her best-remembered scripts are those for Valentino's The Son of the Sheik, Seastrom's The Scarlet Letter and The Wind, Garbo's Anna Christie and Wallace Beery's The Champ; she also co-wrote Dinner at Eight and Camille, and under the pseudonym Frank M. Clifton wrote stories and scripts for 11 Westerns that starred her husband, Fred Thomson. Two of the scripts she wrote for Pickford are among the star's most famous, The Little Princess (1917) and Stella Maris (1918). Neither as nauseating as the Shirley Temple vehicle nor as magical as Alfonso Cuar-on's 1995 version, The Little Princess was directed by Marshall Neilan, who also shot the far more interesting Stella Maris.

In that film, Pickford plays two orphans whose paths inadvertently cross: Stella Maris, a wealthy, beautiful cripple, and Unity Blake, a plain, slightly hunched castoff. Based on a novel by William J. Locke, the film is lavishly melodramatic and features outrageous class politics. (The villainess is a "commoner" who beats Unity so brutally that the woman's hair comes undone.) It's hard to gauge Marion's skills from the intertitles ("Blimey - it stinks elergant."), but what is undeniable is the narrative's elegance, its whimsy and the opportunity it afforded Pickford, as the luckless Unity, to briefly shuck her sweetheart image. Pickford retired in 1933; 13 years later, her friend's career was ended by Louis B. Mayer, who told the writer, "You never did take the business serious enough." Marion died in 1973 at the age of 84; she's credited as having written 325 scripts.