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Qhapter I 4 ranees had been talking about filming the popular novel Stella Dallas with Sam Goldwyn since one of their first meetings. "It's a beautiful woman's story," Sam asserted confidently. "I'm starring Ronald Colman in it." Frances was unable to resist asking, "Asa female impersonator?" "He looked at me sharply for a moment. When he laughed, I put the mental boxing gloves away." Frances always considered the conversation a defining moment in their relationship and they had worked well together on half a dozen films since. When Goldwynfinallysecured the rights after more than a year of negotiating, she gave him credit for "choosing a simple story like Stella Dallas at a time when the public seemed to be clamoring for spectacles or lurid melodrama."1 It was an archetypical tearjerker of "mother love"; Stella is "a gross, common" woman whose only sympathetic attribute is her unconditional love for her child. She gives her high-class husband, Stephen, a divorce as a way for her daughter, Laurel, to have a better life and when Laurel still refuses to leave her, Stella feigns love for the drunken oaf Ed Munn. Laurel goes to live with Stephen and his new wife, Helen, and becomes engaged to a rich, debonair young man of her dreams, just as Stella hoped she would. On the day of their wedding the blinds and curtains are left open in the decorated parlor and as Laurel, exquisite in her weddinggown, uses the window as a reflecting mirror, Stella is standing outside looking in. With her hands holding the bars of the metal fence as if she were gazing from a jail cell, Stella watches as the ring is placed on Laurel's finger. She is still smiling in satisfaction as rain starts to fall and a policeman prods her to move along; the camera fades. Frances adapted the story to not rely on flashbacks and agonized over finding that "thin line between convincing sentimentality and lachrymose melodrama." She mixed comedy scenes with drama in such a sophisticated way that her script was barely tampered with in a remake twenty years later.2 169 F WITHOUT LYING DOWN Casting was crucial to the film's effectivenessand, as usual, Frances had someone in mind. She was working closely for the first time with Henry King, an accomplished director who had risen to prominence with Tollable David and had just returned from over a year in Europe directing Lillian Gish. Frances had written the scenario for the film Sonny, which King had directed several years before, but she approached him with diplomacy. "I don't know ifyou have given any thought to the actress to play the mother, but if you haven't and before you settle on anyone, please think in terms of Belle Bennett. This woman has just what it takes. She is a mother, she has two children, and she has had everything on earth happen to her. Both on stage and off, she is Stella Dallas."3 King recalled being impressed when he had seen the actress in a smallpart in The Wandering Jew and he had quickly developed a faith in Frances. Publicity blurbs claimed that Bennett was cast "after 73 other actors had tried for the part," but Henry King said he thought she "was magnificent" from the start and gave Frances full credit for "a great talent for picking people."4 Sam Goldwyn had already found young Lois Moran to play Laurel, Ronald Colman was cast from the start as Stephen Dallas, and Frances had a suggestion for the young man Laurel marries. Douglas Fairbanks Jr., the boy Frances remembered roller-skating in the lobby of the Algonquin, was now sixteen, athletic looking, and already taller than his father. Doug junior and his mother had spent several years in France, where she found the good life more affordable and instilled in her son a love of Europe that would stay with him for the rest of his life, but when a friend suggested Doug junior might find success as an actor, Beth jumped at the idea. "I think Mother saw at once a waythat she would again supervise a career and involve herself in business," Doug said in retrospect, kindly leaving out the obvious—that a source of income would be a welcome relief.5 Still harboring some resentment of Mary and Doug for forming United Artists, Jesse Lasky signed Doug junior to a Paramount contract in 1922 as a "sort...

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