Celebrating Screenwriting Pioneer Jane Murfin

Jane Murfin, standing and Jane Cowl about 1917 at the time of their Broadway success.

I have been having fun putzing around a Facebook group for old movie buffs.  Lots of great discussions and some great clips.  The topic recently turned to screenwriters.  The usual suspects like Billy Wilder came up.  But my mind turned to the lesser known Jane Murfin one of the most successful women writers in the movies in the ‘20’s and ‘30’s.

There are not a lot of famous Murfins,  so her name pops up a lot if you Google my last name.  I knew that she worked a lot with George Cukor and that she had her hand in several memorable films.  But not a lot more.  Curious, I did a bit of research.  This is what I found.

The first discovery was that she was a Murfin by marriage.  A marriage that did not last very long, but she continued to use the name professionally through two more marriages and a likely lifelong romantic relationship with a close female friend and writing collaborator.

Jane Macklem was born on October 27, 1884 in Quincy, Michigan. Raised in a middle class home she was educated in local public school in Coldwater, Michigan and attended Michigan State Normal School.  Despite the training as a teacher, she was never interested in education—she wanted to go on stage.  

Her first appearance as an actress was a small role in the touring production of popular comedian David Warfield’s hit The Music Master.  She befriended another young actress in the production, Jane Cowl.  The two women not only became inseparable lifelong friends, but writing partners.  Their relationship was close and endured through Jane three marriages.  Whether or not it was also sexual is a matter of some ambiguity.

Jane put aside her stage ambitions in 1907 when she married James Orin Murfin, a prominent attorney, former state senator, and a judge in Wayne County.  Shortly after their marriage, Jane organized a women’s drama club which made amateur productions.  She also began her collaboration as a playwright with Cowl.

She divorced her husband in 1915 and was working as a script editor for Vitagraph Studios in Brooklyn.  Murfin’s first stage collaboration with Cowl, Lilac Time was a hit in 1917.  The pair followed up rapidly with three more successful plays over the next three years—Daybreak, Information Please, and Smilin’ Through.  

  

During this period she married actor/animal trainer/producer Laurence Trimble.  The couple moved to Hollywood in 1920.  Cowl also relocated.

Together Trimble and Murfin searched Europe for a dog to use in movies.  In Germany they discovered a three year old German Sheppard who had been trained for police work.  They renamed the animal Strongheart.  The animal became the first big “movie star dog”, predating Rin Tin Tin.  The couple produced six films starring Strongheart while Murfin and Cowl adapted their plays to films at other studios.  In 1927 Murfin not only wrote, but got behind the camera to direct Flapper Wives in which Strongheart appeared.  

The adaptations of the plays were also successful especially Smilin’ Through which was produced and starred in by Norma Talmadge, a top silent actress.  The play had been produced under the joint pen name of Alan Langdon Martin but Cowl and Murfin shared screenwriting credit in their own names.  The story was so popular it was remade as a talkie in 1934 at MGM with two of the studio’s top stars, Norma Shearer, Fredrick March, and Leslie Howard and yet again in 1941 with Jeanette McDonald and Gene Raymond.

Murfin divorced Trimble in 1927 and concentrated on her career as screenwriter, with and without collaboration with Cowl.  Way Back Home in 1931, for which Murfin wrote the original story as well as the script, was the break-out film that established her as a major—and bankable—writer.  The film is best known today because it was one of Bette Davis’s first films in an important supporting role.

In 1932 Murfin married for the third time to British born character actor Donald Crisp known for his work in costume dramas with Errol Flynn as well has beloved fathers in the classics How Green Was My Valley, National Velvet, and Lassie, Come Home.  Crisp doubled as a shrewd businessman and was on the board of the Bank of America, where he oversaw loans that financed films.  Since his support was critical for getting capital to produce a film, it may have helped his wife get ever better assignments at major studios.  The couple stayed together until 1944.

Murfin worked with George Cukor, the leading director of “women’s pictures,” beginning the same year as her marriage to Crisp with What Price Hollywood starring Constance Bennett.  Murfin and other writers on the film received an Academy Award nomination.

 Other memorable film with Cuckor included uncredited dialogue in Little Women and The Women (with Clair Booth Luce and Anita Loos.

  

Among Murfin’s other notable films were Spitfire, The Little Minister, and Alice Adams all with Katherine Hepburn;  the musical Roberta with Irene Dunn, Fred Astaire, and Ginger Rogers; The Shining Hour in collaboration with Ogden Nash for Joan Crawford; and Pride and Prejudice staring Greer Garson and Lawrence Olivier in collaboration with Aldous Huxley.

Murfin’s production tapered off in the 1940’s as the women’s pictures in which she specialized went out of style.  She wrote Rosalind Russell’s roman a clef take on Emilia Earhart, Flight for Freedom in 1943.  Her last film re-united her with Hepburn in Pearl S. Buck’s Dragon Seed.  

In 2008, 53 years after Jane Murfin died in Los Angeles in 1955 at age 69, she again received screen credit for the updated version of The Women starring Meg Ryan, Eva Mendez, and Annette Bening.

Murfin is buried at Valhalla Memorial Park in North Hollywood.  She lies next to Jane Cowl.  Her headstone reads simply:  Jane Murfin Crisp/Still/“Smilin’ Through”/ 1884-1955.

National Poetry Month—Dorothy Parker—Three Poems

Dorothy Parker is one of those writers now more famous for who she was than what she wrote.  She will forever be etched in the public mind as the queen of the Algonquin Roundtable, that shifting group of Manhattan wits and sophisticate who daily gathered at an Algonquin Hotel table to exchange barbs and bon mots.  Through the Roaring Twenties and into the early years of the Depression the pithy sayings of these gin fueled repasts were breathless repeated in gossip columns read as avidly in Peoria as on Park Avenue.  

Despite her own very real accomplishments, Parker recognized this and even reveled in it.  “Every day,” she said, “I get up, brush my teeth, and sharpen my tongue.”

But Parker was a widely respected magazine journalist, critic, and above all a poet.  Her volumes of humorous verse were beloved best sellers.

Parker was born on August 22, 1893 on the Jersey Shore where her middle class Manhattan parents kept a summer cabin.  Her birth name was Rothschild—her father was of German Jewish descent (not related to the banking family) and her mother was of Scottish ancestry.  Her mother, Eliza died while staying at the same cabin just before her 5th birthday setting off a troubled and unhappy childhood.

Young Dot, as she was called, hated her father’s new wife and referred to her contemptuously as the “the housekeeper.”  She claimed her father physically abused her.  She was openly glad when her step mother died in 1903.  Despite a Jewish father and a Protestant birth mother, she was sent to the Convent of the Blessed Sacrament School probably in hopes that the stern nuns would train her wild rebelliousness.  It didn’t work.  She was expelled when she was 14 for calling the Immaculate Conception “spontaneous combustion.”

After that she was shipped of for an indifferent education at a New Jersey finishing school mostly to keep her out of her father’s hair.  She graduated at age 18 in 1911.  Two years later her father died leaving most of his estate to a sister.  Dorothy went to work playing piano at a dancing school to earn a living.  In her spare time, she was writing verse.

She quickly established a career as a writer after selling her first poem to Vanity Fair in 1914.  Soon after she was hired as a staff writer at a sister publication, Vogue then moved to a similar job at Vanity Fair two years later.

In 1917 she met and married stock broker Edwin Pond Parker II.  They were soon separated by his service in World War I.  Not that she minded much.  Ambivalent about her Jewish identity, especially because she hated her father, she later joked that she got married to acquire a WASP name.  After Parker’s return from the war, the marriage was stormy and eventually ended in diverse in 1926.

Parker’s career really took off when she took over theater reviews at Vanity Fair from the vacationing P.G. Woodhouse.  Her criticism was arch, acerbic, witty, and penetrating.  Readers loved it.  Skewered playwrights, producers, directors, and actors felt differently. 

Parker and fellow staff members Robert Benchley and Robert E. Sherwood began to take a daily largely liquid lunch at the Algonquin Hotel.  They were soon joined by others and by 1919 folks were talking about the Roundtable.  Other early participants included Alexander Wolcott, newspaperman/playwright Charlie MacArthur, Harpo Marx, sportswriter Haywood Broun and playwrights George F. Kaufmann and Marc Connolly.  Franklin Pierce Adams not only began posting quips from the table in his popular column The Conning Tower, but printed whole poems by Parker and other members helping to make their public reputations.

Sometimes all of the publicity the wits received backfired.  Theater producers outraged over several quotes by Parker ridiculing their shows threatened to remove advertising from her employer.  Vanity Fair fired her. Benchley and Sherwood walked out in solidarity.  By then they were all hot commodities and could place poems, reviews and stories in all of the top magazines.

In 1925 Harold Ross founded the New Yorker and brought Parker and Benchley on board as part of his Editorial Board.  Parker now really came into her own.  Her poems became a favorite feature and she contributed sharp, well drawn short stories as well.  Her caustic book reviews as the Constant Reader were very popular.

In 1926 her first volume of poems, drawn from her contributions to the New Yorker, other popular magazines and the Conning Tower sold an amazing 47,000 copies and had generally glowing reviews.  She followed with two more collections, Sunset Gun in 1928 and Death and Taxes in 1931.

Despite her success, which included collaborating on plays with Kaufmann and Elmer Rice, Parker’s personal life was a shambles.  Not only was she drinking heavily, but she was subject to bouts of black depression and suicidal thoughts, which she sometimes hinted at in her poems.  Her marriage was on the rocks and she was engaged in a series of sad, sometimes disastrous love affairs.  Affairs with MacArthur, who would go on to marry actress Helen Hayes, Benchley, and Wolcott resulted in pregnancies and abortions.  After the first she made the first of several suicide attempts.

Her love life and disappointments became the fodder of her most famous short story, Big Blonde published in The Bookman magazine.  It won the prestigious O. Henry Award for Best Short Story of 1929.  She went on to publish several story collections over the next decade.

Parker’s life changed dramatically in 1927 as she became interested in the campaign to save anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti from execution on dubious murder/bank robbery charges in Massachusetts.  Previously largely apolitical, she traveled to Boston to protest and was arrested and fined $5 for picketing.  The experience set of a commitment to leftist causes, social justice, and civil rights that only grew and lasted the rest of her life.

By the early 1930’s the old gang at the Algonquin and newer members like Tallulah Bankhead and Edna Ferber were drifting apart.  The group dynamics of members sleeping with each other or occasional other’s spouses must have contributed.  But so did the increasing demands of successful careers and political tensions between the more conservative members and the increasingly radicalized Parker.

One day in 1932 Ferber showed up for lunch and found the regular table occupied by, “a party from Kansas.”  It was all over.

About that time Parker began a relationship with a fellow New Yorker contributor and sometimes actor Allan Campbell.  Like her, he was of Jewish and Scottish heritage.  He was also ten years younger and an active bi-sexual.  The two were married in 1934 in Taos, New Mexico on the way to Hollywood and the lure of lucrative new careers as screenwriters.

They first caught on at Paramount.  He was put under a contract for $350 which included acting in bit parts, and she got $1000 a week.  They soon, however, established themselves as a successful screen writing duo earning $2,000 to $5,000 a week free lancing a quality studios like MGM and Warner Bros.  Most of the 15 films on which they collaborated were competent, journeyman efforts.  But they earned an Academy Award nomination for the classic A Star is Born in 1937 with Janet Gaynor and Fredrick March.  When Parker’s friend and fellow left wing activist Lillian Hellman was called away from The Little Foxes to work on another project, they were called in two write additional dialogues for the Bette Davis.

The marriage broke up in divorce in 1938 but despite Parkers drinking and suicidal depressions, they continued to work together until Campbell entered the service as a military intelligence officer in World War II.  As her contribution to the war effort she worked with Wolcott and Viking Press on a compact edition of her best stories and poems for soldiers serving overseas. After the War Viking released it for American readers as The Compact Dorothy Parker.  It has never since gone out of print.  

After the war in 1947 Parker won another Oscar nomination for her contributions the Susan Hayward tearjerker Smash-Up, the Story of a Woman.  The story of a woman whose life was disintegrating in alcoholism must have hit awfully close to the bone.

But Parker’s days in Hollywood were number as the Red Scare infected the industry.  For years she had been a leader of local anti-Fascist crusades and organizations.  She had even reported on the Spanish Civil War for The Masses and had helped re-locate defeated veterans of the war to safety in Mexico.  She was active on or chaired several committees—most notably the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League which grew to 4,000 members and was accused funneling large sums of money to the Communist Party.

Parker’s last Hollywood job was The Fan, and adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan for Otto Preminger in 1949.  After that she was hauled before a Congressional Committee, pled the Fifth Amendment, and blacklisted.

In the midst of all of that, Parker re-married Campbell in 1950.  They separated, but did not divorce, in 1952 and Parker returned to New York to take up residency in the Volney Hotel.  Advanced alcoholism prevented her from returning to regular magazine work, although she submitted occasional reviews.  Mostly she made a small living as celebrity guest or panelist on such radio programs as Information Please and Author, Author.  She wrote monologues for old friends Tallulah Bankhead and Ilka Chase.

Despite her drinking, she remained as active as possible politically.  She was especially moved by the Civil Rights Movement as it unfolded on the streets of the South.

In 1960 she reconciled with Campbell and moved back to Los Angeles where the couple worked fitfully on un-realized projects.  In 1962 Campbell committed suicide.  In worse emotional shape than ever, Parker returned to the lonely life of a Volney Hotel drunk.

When she died of a heart attack on June 7, 1967 Parker left her estate, including valuable literary properties, to Martin Luther King, Jr. to support him in his work.  When he was killed days later the estate ended up in the hands of the NAACP.

With no living relative or willing friend to claim them Parker’s ashes stayed in a file cabinet in her lawyer’s office for 17 years until the NAACP claimed them.  They buried them under a marker on the grounds of their Baltimore headquarters.  The plaque reads:

Here lie the ashes of Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) humorist, writer, critic. Defender of human and civil rights. For her epitaph she suggested, “Excuse my dust”. This memorial garden is dedicated to her noble spirit which celebrated the oneness of humankind and to the bonds of everlasting friendship between black and Jewish people. Dedicated by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. October 28, 1988.

A Pig’s Eye View of Literature

The Lives and Times of John Keats,
Percy Bysshe Shelley, and
George Gordon Noel, Lord Byron

Byron and Shelley and Keats
Were a trio of Lyrical treats.
The forehead of Shelley was cluttered with curls,
And Keats never was a descendant of earls,
And Byron walked out with a number of girls,
But it didn't impair the poetical feats
Of Byron and Shelley,
Of Byron and Shelley,
Of Byron and Shelley and Keats.

Autobiography

Oh, both my shoes are shiny new,
And pristine is my hat;
My dress is 1922....
My life is all like that.

Of a Woman Dead, Young

If she had been beautiful, even,
Or wiser than women about her,
Or had moved with a certain defiance;
If she had had sons at her sides,
And she with her hands on their shoulders,
Sons, to make troubled the Gods-
But where was there wonder in her?
What had she, better or eviler,
Whose days were a pattering of peas
From the pod to the bowl in her lap?

That the pine tree is blasted by lightning,
And the bowlder split raw from the mountain,
And the river dried short in its rushing-
That I can know, and be humble.
But that They who have trodden the stars
Should turn from Their echoing highway
To trample a daisy, unnoticed
In a meadow of small, open flowers-
Where is Their triumph in that?
Where is Their pride, and Their vengeance?

–Dorothy Parker