#WomanEmpowermentWednesday #SilentEdition Lenore Coffee

Lenore Coffee got a job right out of graduating Dominican College in working as "the only girl assistant director in the business" for Louis B. Mayer. She started with selling stories to perspective actors then moved to continuity and story editing and then to writing screen titles. Coffee was offered a job to edit and title by Irving Thalberg over at Universal, but chose to work with writers than producers. 

When Garson Studios put out an advertisement in the Motion Pictures Exchange Herald for a script for their actress Clara Kimball Young, Coffee immediately answered it. The studio sent her $100 for her story, but instead of cashing the check, she sent a telegram to the studio insuring that "I am given screen recognition." When she met Henry Garson himself, she admitted she couldn't afford to move to Hollywood from San Francisco since she was supporting her mother. Garson responded immediately, "I think you're going a long way in this business. I'll pay your fare and your mother's fare. ... I'll give you fifty dollars a week on a year's contract." (Coffee, Lenore (c. 1897-1984) | Encyclopedia.com)The script she wrote for the ad manifested itself as "The Better Wife" in 1919. At Garson, Coffee considered herself a "fixer-upper" and received $1,000 a week to ten days of labor per project. 

Coffee would continue her writing at home in Mandeville Canyon and only came into the studios she worked at when necessary. "I wrote the first 20 pages and turned them in. Then I let time pass. They said, 'Where's the rest?' I said, 'I can't work away from home so let's call it off.' They liked the first pages I sent so much they told me I could work at home."

In 1938, she moved to working in the script department at Warner Brothers as the only woman in the department. During this time she also wrote a play and a novel titled Another Time, Another Place which the Los Angeles Times described as "show [ing] that a woman would be a career woman with lots of brains and have no sense." 

Coffee moved to England in 1959 with her director husband William Joyce Cowen but moved back to California, where she lived in retirement in the Motion Picture Home in Woodland Hills. She passed away on July 2, 1984. 

Links to Check Out

Lenore Coffee - Women Film Pioneers Project