The Girls in The Picture

Have you ever realized that you change your behavior depending on who you are spending time with?  There are different types of personalities.  The people who are helpers and those who are takers.  those who are insecure and need constant reassurance.  When you find your best friend it is usually someone who compliments your personality and needs.  But, if you are masking your true self to be friends or circumstances change and you change over time, that can stress the friendship. 
This novel, explores the relationship of two such friends, Mary Pickford and Frances Marion. 
Author, Melanie Benjamin has taken the research and facts she was able to unearth and written an entertaining and compelling story about how Mary and Frances became friends and how much they needed each other all through their lives. 

I really loved this novel, which tells the story of Mary Pickford the Queen of Motion Pictures and her best friend Frances Marion, the best scenarist, or film writer of early motion pictures.  Wonderfully imagined are the conversations between the two women, which show how their friendship ebbed and flowed over the years as Hollywood went through its infancy of silent films to talkies and through WWI.   Mary marries her prince charming, Douglas Fairbanks and rides out a turbulent marriage.  Melanie Benjamin captures the times and the characters in such realistic clarity.

They were the only girls in the picture.  Mary Pickford and Frances Marion became fast friends because they were both driven in their careers at a time when other women were not.  They were willing to give up their personal lives, love, marriage, and children to move their careers ahead. They were willing to stand up to the male run world of big business and Hollywood.  Refusing to use the casting couch to get ahead.  Yes, the casting couch was a well known situation all the way back to the early days of Hollywood and silent movies.  What would these women think of the #METOO movement that took so long to stand up to the chauvinism of the men in charge.

They have been through quite of bit of history together.  Their single years, the start of their careers, their marriages and the loss of their husbands.  At the end Mary hides away in her bedroom.  Frances avoids her for a number years, but in the end she cannot stay away.  They have a pull on each other.
Frances confronts Mary and they have a discussion that ends unpleasantly. 

Frances leaves and realizes that they see the past from different viewpoints, "When I thought back on all those years, those golden years, that was how I remembered it.  At least - that was how I chose to remember it; I knew now that Mary remembered something different.  Something darker. 
Something closer to the truth?  No just a different truth; ...like a movie shot from a different point of view...  We remembered these identical experiences differently, but that didn't make them any less truthful."

To me that sums up the story of many relationships, between friends, spouses, and even in business.
These are powerful words to recognize in all our everyday interactions.