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Chapter One
Frances, the Lawn Child
She was born on December 21, 1890, in Belleville, New Jersey, then a pretty village on the Passaic River, where, her mother wrote, "sturgeon leapt and lawns ran down to shining waters." She had an older sister; a brother, another sister, and another brother (my father) followed. When she was two, the family moved to nearby Nutley, an equally pleasant village within easy distance of New York on the Erie Railroad and Hudson River ferries. In Nutley, there were green fields, tree-lined roads, big, comfortable houses, and another stretch of the clear, unspoiled Passaic. "It was lovely," Frances once said. "All around us were woods, and every spring the woods were full of wildflowers." The social center was the Field Club, featuring archery, outdoor teas, amateur theatricals, dances, and children's parties; 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, Henry Wickes Goodrich, who'd been born in Brooklyn in 1860, the son of William Winton Goodrich, an eminent admiralty lawyer and for a time presiding justice of the Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court. Henry was compact and fair-haired, with a neatly trimmed Vandyke beard; he went to Amherst and Columbia Law School, then joined his father's New York firm. Henry did all right as a lawyer, but his real loves were directing amateur play productions and reciting poetry to groups of children in his big, turreted house. He marched in suffragette parades andserved as president of Nutley's Board of Education, and he had imagination: during visits to museums, so his five children could "better appreciate color," he had them face away from the pictures, then bend over and look upside down between their legs. Henry enjoyed good company and brandy and cigars, and belonged to clubs in Nutley, Newark, and the summer colony in Little Compton, Rhode Island. His favorite club was The Players, in New York. Many members were actors and artists; Henry spent long hours on the piazza, placing modest bets on the color of the next passing horse or pair of ladies' stockings.
Frances's mother, Madeleine Christy Lloyd, was born in New York City in 1862, the daughter of a grim-looking, rigidly Calvinistic, Dutch Reformed minister named Aaron. She was small, slender, and quiet, but underneath were practicality, a strong will, and wry humor. She was never without a book and was passionate about the novels of Henry James. Madeleine, who was always close to Frances and gave her boundless career encouragement, had three brothers and a sister.
Frances never knew her uncle David Demarest Lloyd—he died just before she was born. One of the editors of the New York Tribune, he wrote plays 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 probably found him reserved and conventional.
Frances's only maternal aunt, Caroline—called "Caro"—was always plainly 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, evidently because he turned out to have another wife in England; he drowned in the sinking of the Lusitania. Caro later married a New York jeweler and joined the Communist Party; when she died, in 1940, she was one of the three female co-owners of the Daily Worker. Caro's radicalism caused many family arguments; Frances loved her dearly but didn't buy her far-left convictions.
Frances's third uncle, Henry Demarest Lloyd, was a lawyer, journalist, editorialist, and author. His 1894 book, Wealth Against Commonwealth, exposing the machinations of the Standard Oil Company, has been cited often as a muck-raking classic; he himself was called one of his era's "great champions of social and economic justice." His friends included Clarence Darrow, Eugene Debs, Booker T. Washington, and Jane Addams; Robert Louis Stevenson said he was a "very capable, clever fellow." As a child, Frances visited his handsome, forty-room Little Compton house (his wife was 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 Collegiate School, and on to Vassar. At Vassar, then one of America's best all-female colleges, she joined various clubs and was elected to class committees. Her greatest love, probably inherited from her father, was directing plays; her graduation yearbook quote was, "Silence there, please! We're rehearsing." She also loved acting but didn't always get the best roles; she once wrote to her mother, "I'm afraid you don't realize how inconsolable I am about losing that part. The star part ... And I've lost it after such a fight.... I clenched my fists and yelled." All her life, Frances protested when people were treated unfairly—and her letters from Vassar showed that: she complained about 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 two women with all the authority in their hands, one woman a doddering idiot who only has enough craftiness to lie, lie, lie!" Another villain was the college doctor: "I know she has done more harm than good.... The medical department ... is rotten at its core." (Frances was always suspicious of doctors: "Medicine always seems to work the wrong way with me. Perhaps because I distrust it." Albert once said that, to prevent colds, she should avoid drafts: "I think I'll put her in a bell jar.")
Frances could also be outspoken about family matters. Once, learning that her teenage brother Lloyd (my father) wanted to become a painter, she decided that would be risky and loudly told their parents to "Nip it in the bud!" Years later, Frances and Lloyd agreed that she'd been right: instead of painting, he became an art historian and museum director and did as well in that field as she did in hers. Although Frances could be feisty and petulant, she also had a softer, self-aware side. "This childlike, silly harangue," she once wrote to her mother, "although it has no doubt shocked your literary taste ... has relieved me.... I find that the only thing that will console me is a box of oranges.... I must have them."
Frances's parents were listed in the Social Register, and many of her college friends "came out." She did, too, but nobody in the family now knows when or where, because she almost never mentioned her debut—probably because it had bored her. After graduating from Vassar in 1912 (most of her classmates wore white dresses during the ceremony, but Frances later boasted that she wore red), she studied briefly at the New York School of Social Service and kept up her interest in acting. After performing in a comedy at The Players, she was invited to join two friends in a vaudeville act, but her father said no. "I said, 'You're ruining my life, you're ruining my 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 1912 with the advice of serious theater-world people, including Harvard professor George Pierce Baker, and had fine directors. The company, whose motto was "of the people, by the people, for the people," performed in the Academy of Music, an imposing, city-owned building on Main Street with Louis 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. Most were 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 their authors included Arthur Wing Pinero, J. M. Barrie, and William Butler Yeats. Frances also appeared in Hamlet as the Player Queen; Horatio was played by William Powell. Years later, in Hollywood, Powell's career got its 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 the company villain but never got, he said, even "an enthusiastic hiss." Also in the company was a "juvenile" actor named Robert Downing Ames.
Bob Ames was a year older than Frances, blond, and good-looking. The son of a Hartford, Connecticut, insurance executive, he'd worked as a ticket seller in a Hartford theater in his teens and had started acting there at age twenty. An associate of the actor-manager Henry Miller spotted him; after minor parts in Miller road shows, he went to Northampton to get more 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 show a 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 also went there, said it was like being "mewed up in a nunnery"). During her seasons in Northampton, she and Bob Ames were constantly together, acting in the same plays. Ames was intriguingly different from the gently reared Ivy Leaguers Frances had grown up with in Nutley and Little Compton: he was a hard-working member of a glamorous profession (of her profession). Also, other women were attracted to him—a newspaper article called him a "heartbreaker." In later years, thanks to his presence, looks, and talent, he did well on the stage and in films, playing featured roles as the husband or lover of Pola Negri, Ina Claire, Mary Astor, Vilma Banky, and Gloria Swanson.
In the fall of 1916, Ames moved to Broadway in a Henry Miller hit, Come Out of the Kitchen, a sentimental comedy, starring Ruth Chatterton, about a temporarily broke family who pose as servants in their own Virginia mansion while it's rented to rich Northerners. Four months later, Frances made her Broadway debut in the same show, as one of the Northerners' houseguests. The play had elaborate sets and aggressive publicity: the chintz 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 imported from Virginia" was served onstage. Frances's part was small, and she got no special mention in the reviews, but one critic said the play was acted by "an agreeable company of charming people, who know their business."
"Charming people" fit Frances neatly. Both on and off the stage, charm came to her so naturally, one observer wrote, that she "tended to deprecate it." By now, she was well-trained as an actress, and until she and Albert started writing full-time, she appeared in many different shows—but never in major roles. The problem may have been her intelligence, which she couldn't tune out completely; perhaps it kept her personality from reaching the audience. The playwright George Kelly once told her, "Do less—it will make the audience think you're better than you are." Her fellow actors called her "adequate but not interesting" and "seemingly insecure in her womanhood," and she agreed, once saying flatly, "I wasn't very good." That seems exaggerated: performers who truly aren't very good don't work as often as she did.
Being under Henry Miller's management in plays like Come Out of the Kitchen 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 because you were one of the company." Obviously, being together with Robert Ames in Northampton and New York—where Frances lived in an East 28th 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 Grace Episcopal Church, had helped pay for its good-looking murals, but—probably because Ames was divorced—the ceremony wasn't held there but instead in the big, rambling, book-filled house at 187 Nutley Avenue, where a moose head loomed eerily over the piano. A few days later, the newlyweds left on a California-bound tour with the rest of the Come Out of the Kitchen company.
Frances's marriage to Bob Ames lasted six years and was clouded from the start, mainly by his drinking, which ultimately helped to kill him at age forty-two, Another problem was that their careers often separated them: for example, between January and June 1918, Frances toured with a Come Out 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, Ames evidently didn't like being married to an actress: he once said that "one prima donna in a family is quite enough."
In late 1919, apparently trying to stabilize her marriage, Frances quit the stage; describing this time, she wrote, "For a year, I've been a parasite, doing nothing." At home, in their East 45th Street apartment, she was probably a fine hostess—she always did well in that department—but, having grown up with servants, was hopeless in other areas. She often said, almost sounding proud, "I can't cook," and she hated tasks like washing curtains and mopping kitchens. Several times, she brought Ames to Little Compton to visit her family. My father recalled that he was pleasant and was an avid golfer who made his own clubs; Frances's aunt Caro wasn't as kind, referring to him as "poor Bob."
Frances and Robert Ames were divorced in 1923. Later, he was married and divorced two more times. His third wife was the beautiful, sweet-voiced Vivienne Segal, who starred in such shows as No, No, Nanette and Pal Joey; about her, Ames griped, "For three years I was more or less of a lackey, 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 she pleaded with him to "climb on the water wagon."
Although their marriage was unhappy, Frances and Ames remained friendly afterward—at least on the surface. The year after their divorce, they both appeared in the out-of-town tryouts of a "golf comedy" called Kelly's Vacation. Frances had a minor part; Ames, the leading man, showed off his swing by hitting drives into the wings, but even so the play failed to reach Broadway. Three years later, when Frances was in Chicago acting in 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 a young New York nightclub hostess named Helen Lambert, who told the newspapers she was suing Ames because he'd promised to marry her. The tabloids loved this, running headlines like "Triangle Surrounds Ames," and "Wife, Ex-Wife, Would-Be Wife, All Under One Roof." Miss Lambert's lawyer declared that the suit would "teach Ames that he cannot play with the hearts of women at will." Tracked down by reporters, Frances said that although Ames owed her back alimony, she wasn't suing and was so pleased with his recent marriage that the first thing she expected to do was hunt up Ames and his wife and have dinner with them.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Real Nick and Nora by David L. Goodrich. Copyright © 2001 by David L. Goodrich. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
