Chapter One
Frances, the Lawn Child
She was born on December 21, 1890, in Belleville, New Jersey, then apretty village on the Passaic River, where, her mother wrote, "sturgeonleapt and lawns ran down to shining waters." She had an older sister; abrother, another sister, and another brother (my father) followed. Whenshe was two, the family moved to nearby Nutley, an equally pleasant villagewithin easy distance of New York on the Erie Railroad and HudsonRiver ferries. In Nutley, there were green fields, tree-lined roads, big, comfortablehouses, and another stretch of the clear, unspoiled Passaic. "It waslovely," Frances once said. "All around us were woods, and every springthe woods were full of wildflowers." The social center was the Field Club,featuring archery, outdoor teas, amateur theatricals, dances, and children'sparties; the neighbors included businessmen, lawyers, doctors, architects,artists, writers, and well-to-do dilettantes.
One of the leaders of the Nutley community was Frances's father, HenryWickes Goodrich, who'd been born in Brooklyn in 1860, the son of WilliamWinton Goodrich, an eminent admiralty lawyer and for a time presidingjustice of the Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court.Henry was compact and fair-haired, with a neatly trimmed Vandykebeard; he went to Amherst and Columbia Law School, then joined his father'sNew York firm. Henry did all right as a lawyer, but his real loveswere directing amateur play productions and reciting poetry to groupsof children in his big, turreted house. He marched in suffragette paradesand served as president of Nutley's Board of Education, and he had imagination:during visits to museums, so his five children could "better appreciatecolor," he had them face away from the pictures, then bend overand look upside down between their legs. Henry enjoyed good companyand brandy and cigars, and belonged to clubs in Nutley, Newark, and thesummer colony in Little Compton, Rhode Island. His favorite club wasThe Players, in New York. Many members were actors and artists; Henryspent long hours on the piazza, placing modest bets on the color of the nextpassing horse or pair of ladies' stockings.
Frances's mother, Madeleine Christy Lloyd, was born in New York Cityin 1862, the daughter of a grim-looking, rigidly Calvinistic, Dutch Reformedminister named Aaron. She was small, slender, and quiet, but underneathwere practicality, a strong will, and wry humor. She was neverwithout a book and was passionate about the novels of Henry James.Madeleine, who was always close to Frances and gave her boundless careerencouragement, had three brothers and a sister.
Frances never knew her uncle David Demarest Lloyd—he died just beforeshe was born. One of the editors of the New York Tribune, he wroteplays that were performed in New York and other cities; the ads for one,The Woman Hater, said it was "as full of laughs as a shad is of bones."
John Crilley Lloyd was a gentle, humorous, tidily dressed coffee merchant,known as "the inventor of the Yuban blend," and a lifelong bachelor.Like others in the family, Frances enjoyed his company but probablyfound him reserved and conventional.
Frances's only maternal aunt, Caroline—called "Caro"—was alwaysplainly dressed and had dark, almost-fierce-looking eyes. She went to Vassar,then briefly taught school. In Paris, she married a flaky-sounding"philosophical anarchist" and professional genealogist from Newburyport,Massachusetts, named Lothrop Withington. Caro divorced him, evidentlybecause he turned out to have another wife in England; hedrowned in the sinking of the Lusitania. Caro later married a New Yorkjeweler and joined the Communist Party; when she died, in 1940, she wasone of the three female co-owners of the Daily Worker. Caro's radicalismcaused many family arguments; Frances loved her dearly but didn't buyher far-left convictions.
Frances's third uncle, Henry Demarest Lloyd, was a lawyer, journalist,editorialist, and author. His 1894 book, Wealth Against Commonwealth, exposingthe machinations of the Standard Oil Company, has been citedoften as a muck-raking classic; he himself was called one of his era's "greatchampions of social and economic justice." His friends included ClarenceDarrow, Eugene Debs, Booker T. Washington, and Jane Addams; RobertLouis Stevenson said he was a "very capable, clever fellow." As a child,Frances visited his handsome, forty-room Little Compton house (his wifewas rich), where she was bossed around by a German fräulein. All her life,Frances recalled and respected her Uncle Henry's progressive ideas.
Frances went to a private grade school in Nutley, then to Passaic CollegiateSchool, and on to Vassar. At Vassar, then one of America's best all-femalecolleges, she joined various clubs and was elected to class committees. Hergreatest love, probably inherited from her father, was directing plays; hergraduation yearbook quote was, "Silence there, please! We're rehearsing."She also loved acting but didn't always get the best roles; she once wroteto her mother, "I'm afraid you don't realize how inconsolable I am aboutlosing that part. The star part ... And I've lost it after such a fight.... Iclenched my fists and yelled." All her life, Frances protested when peoplewere treated unfairly—and her letters from Vassar showed that: she complainedabout college officials who "can't argue and won't listen to justice....It's a horrible feeling to realize you're in the right but that there are twowomen with all the authority in their hands, one woman a doddering idiotwho only has enough craftiness to lie, lie, lie!" Another villain was the collegedoctor: "I know she has done more harm than good.... The medicaldepartment ... is rotten at its core." (Frances was always suspicious of doctors:"Medicine always seems to work the wrong way with me. Perhapsbecause I distrust it." Albert once said that, to prevent colds, she shouldavoid drafts: "I think I'll put her in a bell jar.")
Frances could also be outspoken about family matters. Once, learningthat her teenage brother Lloyd (my father) wanted to become a painter, shedecided that would be risky and loudly told their parents to "Nip it in thebud!" Years later, Frances and Lloyd agreed that she'd been right: insteadof painting, he became an art historian and museum director and did aswell in that field as she did in hers. Although Frances could be feisty andpetulant, she also had a softer, self-aware side. "This childlike, silly harangue,"she once wrote to her mother, "although it has no doubt shockedyour literary taste ... has relieved me.... I find that the only thing that willconsole me is a box of oranges.... I must have them."
Frances's parents were listed in the Social Register, and many of her collegefriends "came out." She did, too, but nobody in the family now knowswhen or where, because she almost never mentioned her debut—probablybecause it had bored her. After graduating from Vassar in 1912 (most ofher classmates wore white dresses during the ceremony, but Frances laterboasted that she wore red), she studied briefly at the New York School ofSocial Service and kept up her interest in acting. After performing in acomedy at The Players, she was invited to join two friends in a vaudevilleact, but her father said no. "I said, ‘You're ruining my life, you're ruiningmy life,’" she recalled, "so he went to The Players Club and found somebody,and got me into a stock company."
The Northampton (Massachusetts) Players had been formed in 1912with the advice of serious theater-world people, including Harvard professorGeorge Pierce Baker, and had fine directors. The company, whosemotto was "of the people, by the people, for the people," performed in theAcademy of Music, an imposing, city-owned building on Main Street withLouis Comfort Tiffany windows and one thousand seats in the orchestra,orchestra circle, and balcony. Most of the actors lived in nearby hotels.Frances worked often in Northampton from 1913 through 1916, appearing,usually as the ingenue, in at least twenty different productions. Mostwere comedies, with titles like In the Vanguard, A Pot o' Broth, Nearly Married,and The Dawn of a Tomorrow, and they're forgotten today, but theirauthors included Arthur Wing Pinero, J. M. Barrie, and William ButlerYeats. Frances also appeared in Hamlet as the Player Queen; Horatio wasplayed by William Powell. Years later, in Hollywood, Powell's career gotits greatest-ever boost from The Thin Man, which was scripted by the Hacketts,and he said to Albert, "Your wife? I was with her in the Civil War."For Powell, the Northampton experience was unhappy: he was often thecompany villain but never got, he said, even "an enthusiastic hiss." Alsoin the company was a "juvenile" actor named Robert Downing Ames.
Bob Ames was a year older than Frances, blond, and good-looking. Theson of a Hartford, Connecticut, insurance executive, he'd worked as aticket seller in a Hartford theater in his teens and had started acting thereat age twenty. An associate of the actor-manager Henry Miller spotted him;after minor parts in Miller road shows, he went to Northampton to getmore experience before going to Broadway. By the time Frances met him,he was twenty-four, had married and divorced a woman from Fall River,Massachusetts, and had two children who lived with their mother.
Frances was now twenty-three, energetic, and attractive: photos showa well-dressed, demure young lady, who is obviously proud of her profile.So far, her life had been sheltered: at home, traces of Calvinism lingered;at Vassar, sharp-eyed deans had kept watch (one of her sisters, who alsowent there, said it was like being "mewed up in a nunnery"). During herseasons in Northampton, she and Bob Ames were constantly together, actingin the same plays. Ames was intriguingly different from the gentlyreared Ivy Leaguers Frances had grown up with in Nutley and LittleCompton: he was a hard-working member of a glamorous profession (ofher profession). Also, other women were attracted to him—a newspaperarticle called him a "heartbreaker." In later years, thanks to his presence,looks, and talent, he did well on the stage and in films, playing featuredroles as the husband or lover of Pola Negri, Ina Claire, Mary Astor, VilmaBanky, and Gloria Swanson.
In the fall of 1916, Ames moved to Broadway in a Henry Miller hit, ComeOut of the Kitchen, a sentimental comedy, starring Ruth Chatterton, abouta temporarily broke family who pose as servants in their own Virginiamansion while it's rented to rich Northerners. Four months later, Francesmade her Broadway debut in the same show, as one of the Northerners'houseguests. The play had elaborate sets and aggressive publicity: thechintz wall coverings in the mansion's drawing room reportedly had been"aged" by applying coatings of alcohol, shellac, and buttermilk; a dinner,prepared backstage by a "real cook of the old mammy school importedfrom Virginia" was served onstage. Frances's part was small, and she gotno special mention in the reviews, but one critic said the play was actedby "an agreeable company of charming people, who know their business."
"Charming people" fit Frances neatly. Both on and off the stage, charmcame to her so naturally, one observer wrote, that she "tended to deprecateit." By now, she was well-trained as an actress, and until she and Albertstarted writing full-time, she appeared in many different shows—butnever in major roles. The problem may have been her intelligence, whichshe couldn't tune out completely; perhaps it kept her personality fromreaching the audience. The playwright George Kelly once told her, "Doless—it will make the audience think you're better than you are." Her fellowactors called her "adequate but not interesting" and "seemingly insecurein her womanhood," and she agreed, once saying flatly, "I wasn'tvery good." That seems exaggerated: performers who truly aren't verygood don't work as often as she did.
Being under Henry Miller's management in plays like Come Out of theKitchen was fine, Frances said: "You had no contract because it wasn't necessary....You could count on 52 weeks of work out of the year becauseyou were one of the company." Obviously, being together with RobertAmes in Northampton and New York—where Frances lived in an East28th Street hotel—was also fine: the two fell in love, and on May 3, 1917,they were married. Frances's father, a strong supporter of Nutley's GraceEpiscopal Church, had helped pay for its good-looking murals, but—probablybecause Ames was divorced—the ceremony wasn't held there but insteadin the big, rambling, book-filled house at 187 Nutley Avenue, wherea moose head loomed eerily over the piano. A few days later, the newlywedsleft on a California-bound tour with the rest of the Come Out of theKitchen company.
Frances's marriage to Bob Ames lasted six years and was clouded from thestart, mainly by his drinking, which ultimately helped to kill him at ageforty-two, Another problem was that their careers often separated them:for example, between January and June 1918, Frances toured with a ComeOut of the Kitchen company to Detroit, Toledo, Washington, Syracuse,Brooklyn, Rochester (twice), and Baltimore; during those five months,Ames was with the company for approximately two. In addition, Amesevidently didn't like being married to an actress: he once said that "oneprima donna in a family is quite enough."
In late 1919, apparently trying to stabilize her marriage, Frances quit thestage; describing this time, she wrote, "For a year, I've been a parasite,doing nothing." At home, in their East 45th Street apartment, she wasprobably a fine hostess—she always did well in that department—but,having grown up with servants, was hopeless in other areas. She oftensaid, almost sounding proud, "I can't cook," and she hated tasks likewashing curtains and mopping kitchens. Several times, she brought Amesto Little Compton to visit her family. My father recalled that he was pleasantand was an avid golfer who made his own clubs; Frances's aunt Carowasn't as kind, referring to him as "poor Bob."
Frances and Robert Ames were divorced in 1923. Later, he was marriedand divorced two more times. His third wife was the beautiful, sweet-voicedVivienne Segal, who starred in such shows as No, No, Nanette andPal Joey; about her, Ames griped, "For three years I was more or less of alackey, pushing elevator buttons and waiting for her to get dressed for appointments."His fourth wife, a New York socialite named Muriel Oakes,once described what happened when he drank—"liquor made him sulky,bad-tempered, and irritable"—and said he was often cruel to her when shepleaded with him to "climb on the water wagon."
Although their marriage was unhappy, Frances and Ames remainedfriendly afterward—at least on the surface. The year after their divorce,they both appeared in the out-of-town tryouts of a "golf comedy" calledKelly's Vacation. Frances had a minor part; Ames, the leading man, showedoff his swing by hitting drives into the wings, but even so the play failedto reach Broadway. Three years later, when Frances was in Chicago actingin another play, and Ames was there with his brand-new, fourth wife,Miss Oakes, all three checked into the same hotel—and were joined by ayoung New York nightclub hostess named Helen Lambert, who told thenewspapers she was suing Ames because he'd promised to marry her.The tabloids loved this, running headlines like "Triangle SurroundsAmes," and "Wife, Ex-Wife, Would-Be Wife, All Under One Roof." MissLambert's lawyer declared that the suit would "teach Ames that he cannotplay with the hearts of women at will." Tracked down by reporters,Frances said that although Ames owed her back alimony, she wasn't suingand was so pleased with his recent marriage that the first thing she expectedto do was hunt up Ames and his wife and have dinner with them.
Continues...
Excerpted from The Real Nick and Noraby David L. Goodrich Copyright © 2004 by David L. Goodrich. Excerpted by permission.
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