The Last Titan. A Life of Theodore Dreiser

gave her a copy of The Hand of the Potter, autographed to “My little Ore-

gon cousin.”

Dreiser had to have this enticing woman, whose body, Ed’s daughter Vera

later recalled in echo of her parents’ view of Helen as an interloper, “reeked

of sex appeal.” The preliminaries were quick. Helen, too, was looking for

love as well as a new adventure in life. She and Woodward had trysted briefly,

but their sexual relationship wasn’t going anywhere.38 She had saved just

enough from her secretary’s job to try her luck as an actress and was plan-

ning to embark for Hollywood within weeks. Dreiser had the coincidental

excuse of investigating an oªer from a motion picture company now that

the movie industry was rebounding from the national flu epidemic that had

emptied out the movie theaters in 1918. After a meeting or two, frustrated

encounters for Dreiser in which he told her “there can be no simple friend-

ship between us,” Dreiser victoriously announced in his journal for Sep-

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tember 20, “Sex satisfaction & agreement have brought us close to-

gether. . . . Feel that I am due for a long period with her, maybe years.”39

Almost a month before, he had celebrated his forty-eighth birthday.

By this time, Dreiser had reneged on his commitment to John Lane and

agreed to give Boni & Liveright the finished manuscript of The Bulwark.

The firm in turn agreed to pay him an advance of $4,000 in the form of

twelve monthly payments of $333.33. The advance was also to be applied

to the other books the firm had either published or had in press, but it was

clear that Dreiser received the advance for mainly one reason. “We are to

have and have the sole right to publish in book form the novel you are now

writing.” The contract refers specifically to “The Bulwark” and also describes

it as the book listed in the John Lane catalog for “1917 or 1918.” Given

Dreiser’s growing capriciousness with publishers because of the mistrust

built up over the years, it was probably important that Liveright laid claim

to the next “novel you are now writing.” Perhaps the publisher should have

been clearer on the length, but he merely urged the wordy Dreiser to keep

it “well within 175,000 words.”40

Dreiser sublet his Greenwich Village flat for $50 a month, and he and

Helen sailed on the Momus for New Orleans on October 8, the first stop

on their journey to Los Angeles. The suddenness of their departure was

probably due to the pressures of Dreiser’s other female commitments. Even

though the emotional Estelle wasn’t with him that steadily any longer, it

would have been di‹cult for him to explain Helen. At the same time Louise,

fearing that he was breaking with her, wrote a letter begging to see him be-

fore he left. And Lillian, whose tenacity had already outlasted several oth-

ers, came to the boat to kiss him goodbye once Helen had gone below to

their berth. Even though it was October, New Orleans was “sweltering,”

and Dreiser got mysteriously sick—so ill that they considered returning to

New York. As a tentative step, they took a train to St. Louis, where by the

time of their arrival he had recovered. Apparently, he had developed a chill

from lying on the grass at an old Spanish fort they had visited near the Cres-

cent City.41

Seeing St. Louis again after so many years, the city where he had become

a full-fledged journalist, no doubt speeded up his recovery. The magnificent

train station with its gilded arches that greeted them had still been under

construction when he left the city in 1894. He walked downtown past the

buildings that housed the Globe-Democrat and the Republic, but he appar-

ently didn’t visit either establishment. He and Helen were soon on their

way again by train, reaching Los Angeles during the first few days of No-

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2 8 7

vember 1919. They found oil wells scattered all over the sprawling city and,

it seemed, almost as many movie studios. Hollywood and its immediate

environs had become the home of more than fifty studios by 1920, em-

ploying some twenty-five thousand people. And there were many more,

like Helen, who were there looking for work in the “moving pictures.” It

had all started with Edison’s “studio” in New Jersey; by the time World War

I had ended, the American film industry had surpassed even the French

and the Italian moviemakers. Southern California emerged as its capital be-

cause of its diverse geography and clement weather. And, in addition to

the adjacent deserts, mountains, and forests, the studios could keep costs

lower than in the East because Los Angeles was a non-union city.42

This was still the era of silent film; the talkies were almost a decade away.

It was also the beginning of the Hollywood star system, and some of the

biggest names in the motion picture business in 1920, both actors and di-

rectors, were D. W. Gri‹th, Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fair-

banks, and William S. Hart—all making astronomical salaries for that day,

or even this one. Only a year before these people had banded together to

form United Artists, their own distribution company through which they

could earn even more money from their unique talents. Also, as indepen-

dent producers instead of contract players for such directors as Jesse L. Lasky,

William Fox, Cecil B. DeMille, Adolph Zukor, Louis B. Mayer, or Samuel

Goldfish (soon to be changed to “Goldwyn”), they could better control the

aesthetic quality of their productions. The industry was otherwise mo-

nopolized by sentimental or (in the case of DeMille) oversexed scenarios.

One of the first movies United Artists produced was Gri‹th’s Broken Blos-

soms (1919) starring Miss Pickford. Her success in this film and earlier ones

or the performance of Gloria Swanson in Male and Female, released the

same year, emboldened thousands of young women who imagined they were

as talented and beautiful to flock to Hollywood in search of movie star-

dom. Most were sent home broke and demoralized after a few weeks or

months. Those that were luckier, like Helen, landed bit parts in movies that

paid between $7.50 and $10 a day.

After spending a week at the Stillwell Hotel at Ninth and Grand, on No-

vember 8 they rented a room with a modest balcony on Alvarado near West-

lake (now MacArthur) Park for thirty dollars a month. Even though Dreiser

was under contract to finish The Bulwark, he tried writing screenplays that

he oªered, without success, to the Lasky Studio and elsewhere. One was

“The Long, Long Trail,” which had a “fugitive” plot. Another was a South

Sea scenario. A third was called “Lady Bountiful, Jr.,” which he tried to pitch

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to United Artists. He admitted to himself, however, that he was writing

sentimental claptrap and scoªed in his journal that “The agent thought it

was so good.” It is worth noting that the plot of “Lady Bountiful, Jr.,” in-

volving a young woman who is rescued by a father she had never known,

generally resembles the story in Augustin Daly’s Under the Gaslight—the

play that makes a “star” of Carrie in the eyes of Hurstwood and Drouet.43

Dreiser kept his street addresses a secret throughout his stay in Los An-

geles, mainly because Jug was seeking alimony and would presently appeal

to Liveright for his whereabouts.44 “P. O. Box 181” was all that anyone got.

When friends came to town, he met them in either a restaurant or their

hotel lobby. The postal box also allowed him to receive mail from female

admirers without Helen’s knowledge. He apparently left New York with-

out telling anybody, including Mencken, who didn’t think any more of

Southern California than he had of Greenwich Village. “What in hell are

you doing in Los [Angeles], among all the New Thoughters, swamis and

other such vermin?” he inquired in his characteristic blend of mockery and

humor. “I hear that all the old maids west of the Mississippi flock to town

in the hope of being debauched. I surely hope you don’t risk your old fowl-

ing-piece on any such game.” It was true that many a young actress hope-

ful of working in the movies was more often than not invited to become

the mistress of a director, assistant director, casting director, or even cam-

era man. Such repeated overtures to Helen almost turned “the Hollywood

Fornicator” (as Mencken privately described Dreiser to Estelle) into the very

puritan he so despised. Dreiser was so irritated that he tried to expose the

practice in a four-part magazine series entitled “Hollywood: Its Morals and