The Girls in the Picture is Melanie Benjamin's novel exploring the friendship of the superstar actress and screenwriter team of Mary Pickford and Frances Marion. The novel follows their relationship from their initial meeting in 1914 to 1969, covering a tremendous amount of ground both in the growth of film and in their personal lives, as well as the fluctuations in their friendship over the years.
Benjamin's novel is an incredibly entertaining read for film fans. It provides a real-life story set against the backdrop of the early days of film, and as each woman begins to find success, both together and separately, it becomes a story of the relationship between two women trying to make it in a man's world. Benjamin masterfully blends the various threads through which she tells the story and tracks the development of her characters. The reader is given a front-row seat to the evolution of Pickford & Marion's careers, experiences with misogyny, love lives, and views of themselves and their relationship. It is intriguing and gripping from the first page. I could have honestly done with it to be a bit longer, as Benajmin covers so much ground that it moves fairly rapidly. As someone who does not often feel things should be longer, this is a huge compliment.
The picture that Benjamin paints of silent-era Hollywood is one of critical glamor. There is magic inherent in the time and the consistent innovation that took place, but Benjamin does not sugarcoat or avoid the conflicts that her protagonists and others in similar positions faced. Instead, she depicts the highs of their successes in conjunction with the lows of struggles to be taken seriously and personal conflicts.
Perhaps the best example of Benjamin's balanced approach to telling the story comes in the marriage of Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. While it begins as an exciting and truly earth-shattering thing, she begins to show more possessive sides of Fairbanks and Pickford's failure to really deal with or admit those issues. All the while Marion stands on the outside, balancing happiness and concern for her friend. I appreciated this depiction of the slow breakdown of Pickford's relationship, both with Fairbanks and Marion. It was more realistic and connected the reader more emotionally to these figures typically just seen as distant icons. It invested the reader more in the story and humanized all the characters involved to a tremendous degree.
Benjamin's book really serves both to humanize Mary Pickford and give Frances Marion her time in the sun, and she balances both of these tasks wonderfully. Of course, with a fictionalized account of real-life, certain concessions have to be made and conversations imagined to make it come together, but overall it was still incredibly informative and enjoyable. It made me want to seek out biographies of both Marion and Pickford to learn more about their real lives. The benefit of a narrative story such as The Girls in the Picture is that it helps the reader to connect to these people so much more as we are made to feel their pains and joys alongside them. Benjamin excels at this, telling a story about two women and their struggle to make it in a man's industry, but more importantly, their efforts to find themselves and support one another in both good times and bad. It is a story of trials and triumph and human successes and failures, set against the backdrop of one of the most innovative and fascinating times in Hollywood's history. Benjamin's novel is an incredibly entertaining read for film fans and one which encourages future reading, which I always appreciate.
But this day, both Mary and Frances paid far more attention to what was going on around them than what was happening on the screen. It was the faces that Mary would remember the most. The faces that reflected all her hopes, her dreams, her instincts as she'd made the movie- faces that laughed, that cried, that frowned, that smiled. Faces that reacted; so very different from those faces made of stone, of male privilege and disapproval, that had surrounded her in that screening room two months ago.
Melanie Benjamin, The Girls in the Picture, p. 127
This book review is part of Raquel Stecher's Summer Reading Classic Film Challenge. Follow her on Twitter (@RaquelStecher) and check the hashtag #ClassicFilmReading to see reviews!
I'm usually wary of novels about people from the classic film era but this sounds like more of a non-fiction novel than a straight fiction one. Thanks for your review!