The Girls in the Picture

Melanie Benjamin strikes again! After taking on the Lindberghs, Mrs. Tom Thumb, and Truman Capote, Benjamin turned her attention to Frances Marion (like Babe Paley, I asked myself, who??) and Mary Pickford. Frances Marion, I learned, was one of the first - and best - screenwriters in Hollywood. She also happened to be one of few women to ply the trade in the early days of movie making. More inexplicably - although Benjamin certainly does her darnedest to explain it - she was best friends with Ms. Pickford (née Gladys Smith) who was, it seems, rather despicable. 

As always, Benjamin has done her homework and brings her characters fully to life, their fun, fame, and flaws equally on display. Hers is a no-holds-barred style and goes a long way toward capturing her protagonists as they really were (one imagines). She did omit Pickford's children, which is perhaps understandable given that, according to Wikipedia, "Both children later said their mother was too self-absorbed to provide real maternal love. ... Ronnie recalled that "Things didn't work out that much, you know. But I'll never forget her. I think that she was a good woman." 

Her topic - the golden days of Hollywood - has certainly been thoroughly mined (West of Sunset and All the Stars in the Heavens came to mind regularly), but in Frances Marion, Benjamin has found a sympathetic character whose story is likely new to her reading audience. (That said, I do live under a pretty big rock, pop culture-wise, so maybe I've just revealed myself as a complete ignoramus.) On occasion, some of Fran's thoughts seemed forced, or overly filtered through the lens of 21st century America - maybe the actresses resented the patrician attitudes and wandering hands, or maybe 100 years ago, women couldn't envision the world to be otherwise. Who knows? I wasn't around, so I won't pretend I do. More interesting is that the type of people drawn to Hollywood, or more to the point, the types of behavior they seem to openly espouse, hasn't changed in the past century.

I liked The Girls in the Picture and read it quickly. I did think that at times it felt Benjamin was writing just to write; that is, whatever point she'd been working to establish or image she wished to evoke had long been accomplished, but the words still flowed and so she committed them to paper. This is a relatively minor flaw, but enough to say that, had the book been 50 or so pages shorter, I'd have been that much more disposed toward it.

Four stars.