The Girls in the Picture

September 1, 2017

Mary Pickford was the first actor to have her name above the marquee, and friend and creative partner Frances Marion was a screenwriter famous for such classics as Dinner at Eight. Together, they're Benjamin's golden, glowing women in the pictures, struggling for power in a world dominated by men. From the New York Times best-selling author of The Aviator's Wife; with a six- to eight-city tour.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 20, 2017
Benjamin (The Swans of Fifth Avenue) escorts readers through the rise and fall of Hollywood’s silent film era by following a friendship and creative collaboration that helped birth the earliest movies: the fruitful, testy bond between the “scenarist” and eventual screenwriter, Frances Marion, and Mary Pickford, a troubled early star. The novel is framed by a reunion late in their lives, in 1969, but focuses on the 1910s and ’20s: Marion’s and Pickford’s meeting, initial closeness and collaboration, marriages and tragedies, and diverging fates in Hollywood. Chapters alternate between the two women’s perspectives—Marion’s sections (written in first person) buzz with her idiosyncratic understanding of her place within the silent film industry, but Pickford’s (puzzlingly, in third person) are used to move the narrative forward and feel lackluster in comparison. Benjamin’s prose and particularly her dialogue are flatly contemporary; conversations between characters lack period nuance, and, while Marion’s and Pickford’s protofeminism is based on substantial research, it is telegraphed mainly in clunky 21st-century sound bites: “ felt that a woman among them was an aberration of nature... and assumed I was there for one purpose only.” However, the heady, infectious energy of the fledgling film industry in Los Angeles is convincingly conveyed—and the loving but competitive friendship between these two women on the rise in a man’s world is a powerful source of both tension and relatability. Agent: Laura Langlie, Laura Langlie Agency

February 1, 2018
Benjamin encores The Swans of Fifth Avenue (2016) with another glam story inspired by the legendary personalities and monkeyshines of America's film pioneers.Silent screen ingenue Mary Pickford (nee Gladys Louise Smith) and screenwriter Frances Marion meet cute on their way to becoming Hollywood A-listers--or, in Mary's case, Hollywood royalty following her marriage to Douglas Fairbanks. An assiduous researcher, Benjamin quickly gets into the heads and hearts of both women, whose professional collaboration and personal friendship over six decades are laced with delicious film trivia, e.g. the secret of Pickford's imperishable golden curls. Moving from "flickers" to "talkies" (which paradoxically required silence on formerly noisy sets) through star-studded wartime newsreels and Hollywood-style Prohibition (teacups filled with gin blossoms), Benjamin touches on the intrigues of an industry finding its legs. Pickford--the first film actress to become "a casualty of her own image"--is rendered in third person and comes off as a bit damaged (for good reason), while Marion--the first writer to win two Academy Awards--narrates her own story with an amused cockiness one might expect from a contemporary of Anita Loos and Adela St. John. Content to stay behind the scenes after briefly trying her hand at acting, Frances provides Mary with the scripts and roles that lock in her reign as "America's Sweetheart," giving Pickford the financial means to co-found (along with Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, and D.W. Griffith) United Artists, the first actor-directed film studio in America. When Mary decides to divorce her first husband (silent film idol Owen Moore--here depicted as a bad character), she turns to her twice-divorced friend for support, certain that "Fran would write her a way out of this." She's already prepaid the favor by setting Frances up with the love of her life, a gift that haunts their relationship to the end of their days.A smart, fond backward glance at two trailblazers from an era when being the only woman in the room was not only the norm, but revolutionary.

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November 1, 2017
Benjamin's (The Swans of Fifth Avenue, 2016) latest stylish historical novel transports readers to Hollywood's early days and views the rise and fall of silent films through the friendship between one of the era's most dazzling stars, Mary Pickford, and Frances Marion, who rose to prominence as a screenwriter. Mary and Frances instantly hit it off when they meet in 1914 as young women in their twenties. For Mary, meeting Frances gives her the opportunity to have a true friend who isn't a potential rival, and for Frances, Mary helps launch her career by hiring Frances to write films for her. The two defy the expectations of male studio heads when their first big collaboration, The Poor Little Rich Girl, turns into a megahit. But as the years go by, professional jealousy and their respective romancesMary's with a married costar and Frances' with a minister turned actorstrain their bond. Benjamin immerses readers in the whirlwind excitement of Mary's and Frances' lives while portraying a rarely seen character, an early woman screenwriter, and deftly exploring the complexities of female friendship.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)