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Number into the highest circles of Washington society. Florence Walton had graduated into the popular dance team of Maurice and Walton. Another Ziegfeld girl had married a Brazilian diamond king, and Florence Uber was suing Tommy Manville for divorce and a $150,000 settlement. Mae cared nothing about all that. What mattered was that the Follies could launch a career. Olive Thomas was on her way; so were Kay Laurel and Lillian Lorraine and Ann Pennington. A girl needed a showcase as Marilyn Miller had in The Passing Show, and no one had glorified the American girl as Ziegfeld in his Follies.
Where did they come from, these girls? Who were they before their personal myths began and the press agent's agile pen took over? The records say Marilyn was Mary Ellen Reynolds of Evansville, Indiana; Olive Thomas was from Charleroi, Pennsylvania and Kay Laurel from Newcastle; Lillian was Eudallean de Jacques from San Francisco; Ann was from Camden, New Jersey. Marion Davies, playing in Chin Chin, was Marion Douras from Brooklyn; Mae Murray was Marie Adrienne Koenig of Portsmouth, Virginia. That's what the records say; the girls didn't even tell each other. This was exactly what they were running from — some humdrum or obscure or dull beginning, from people who didn't understand them or didn't care, from some uninspired one-horse town.
With Marilyn Miller it was a little different. She'd made her debut, aged ^y^ with her mother and stepfather at Dayton, Ohio. She'd trooped all over the world for ten years playing the drums and dancing in their vaudeville act, the Five Columbians (her older sister Ruth sang; her sister Claire was pianist), and Lee Shubert had spotted her when she broke away to do a single in London. But Olive had run away from a stenographer's job to New York; others ran from school or from a sad first marriage; Mae had run from the convent. They never looked back.
"I was brought up by my great-grandmother," Mae would say vaguely if she were asked. "She left me in convents all over