Oh, to have been in the room when Beulah Marie Dix (1876‒1970) and Sada Cowan (1882‒1943) transformed Leonard Merrick’s quiet short story “The Laurels and the Lady” into Cecil B. DeMille’s spectacle, Fool’s Paradise. Merrick’s protagonist Willy Childers was an inept, consumptive poet, hopelessly in love, stuck in a dusty South African backwater, who languishes, experiences momentary happiness, and dies. Dix and Cowan swapped Willy for Arthur Phelps, also without literary talent, but notably an oil speculator in the boomtown of El Paso, Texas. While Willy’s English mother sent him to South Africa’s mining country to try to spark some proper ambition in him, Arthur is a can-do American whose eyesight was damaged fighting on the battlefields of France in World War I.
While Willy’s love object is Rosa Duchene, an actress who comes to South Africa to perform in La Dame aux Camélias, Arthur’s Rosa Duchene is a ballerina devoted to her art and to flirting. She arrives in nearby Hope City to portray Hans Christian Andersen’s Snow Queen, stealing men from their lovers and turning their hearts to ice. Willy never actually meets his Rosa, though Arthur does: in France, in Texas, and in Siam(!). Then, there’s Poll Patchouli. In South Africa she owns a shop which sells “bad scent.” On the Texas-Mexico border, Poll dances with more abandon than form in a cantina owned by the jealous Roderiguez, who throws a mean knife.
It was originally reported that Olga Printzlau and Sada Cowan were adapting the Merrick story for DeMille, but Printzlau’s name soon disappeared, and the magazine Camera (11.03.1922) informed readers that Cowan adapted the original text while Dix wrote the scenario. We’re currently unable to ascertain whether one or both writers added a flying carpet, an exploding cigar, a dog named Chum, a pit full of crocodiles, and a happy ending.
Three changes Dix and Cowan made to Merrick’s popular story demonstrate their mastery of Hollywood cinema’s narrative form. First, they deployed World War I strategically. A short, simple scene on the lawn of a French hospital early in the film economically sets the story’s time and introduces its main character. A shrapnel wound has damaged Arthur’s eyesight, but his stay at the convalescent hospital provides the opportunity to meet Rosa Duchene, sparking the narrative’s trajectory. As a wounded doughboy, his heroic credentials are established from the start.
Contemporary audiences would have recognized the troubles of a disabled veteran returning home, and topicality was an efficient and conventional tool for Dix and Cowan to use as they constructed a plot which became progressively zany. Tapping into World War I also encouraged a particularly ideological sense-making: this young American may be down now; he may be infatuated with a fickle, French beauty; but he will succeed (by getting rich), and will come to recognize Poll’s greater worth (she can sew buttons onto his shirts). After all, Americans helped to win the War, and Arthur had the gumption to ask Rosa for her handkerchief as a keepsake.
Second, about two-thirds of the way through the movie, Dix and Cowan send Arthur – whose sight has been restored – to Siam to woo Rosa. She is there to study ancient religious dances and to play the coquette for Prince Talat-Noi. The exotic destination isn’t as random as one might imagine: DeMille was friends with writer-lecturer Florence Burgess Meehan, considered an expert at the time on all things Siamese, and she became a consultant on the film. What happens to Arthur in Siam dovetails with what he suffered in France: if the Great War nearly robbed him of his sight, Siam bestows greater insight. Siam also provides a contrast, setting post-war America in sharply modern relief. The first images in Fool’s Paradise show El Paso’s bustling, multi-ethnic Main Street, where women drive motorcycles while their babies ride in sidecars, and oil derricks stand sentry, promising wealth beyond measure. Siam looks more traditional. There, women wash clothes in the river, mahouts guide their elephants along a path, and the scalloped domes of buildings evoke an orientalist fantasy (which looks especially stunning in a currently unpreserved color print at the George Eastman Museum). Unsurprisingly, the production ran over-budget: a tantalizing article in Exhibitors Trade Review (24.12.1921) states the film was presented at 11,000 feet when it premiered at New York’s Criterion Theatre, which, if accurate, makes one wonder exactly what was in the now-lost 2,319 feet.
Although played for racist laughs, in El Paso a Black man can shine shoes one day and strike it rich the next; a Native American woman can sit outside her tent smoking a pipe, nonplussed as men shove a piano through the open tent-flap. Conversely, in Siam society has performed the same rituals and danced the same formalized steps for a very long time. Arthur disdains its ancient customs, and after saving a literal sacrificial lamb, he exclaims, “You fellows have some idea of Sport!” Siam is beautiful, but Texas, though rough, is ready for a young man who will now quit writing terrible poems and get about the work of building a dynamic, democratic country.
Dix and Cowan’s third significant addition to the scenario is humor. Here, too, they demonstrate skill and wit. It is no accident that Poll Patchouli steals the show. In fact, all the female characters are plucky and competent. Dix and Cowan write them as imaginative, determined, and good at their jobs – and they all do have jobs. Poll, though, is the funny one. Watch the taxidermy ducks fly when she imitates Rosa’s curtain call. After Arthur leaves her for Rosa, Poll warns Chum, his dog, “You’d better go with him  – or he’ll quit you, too – for a French Poodle!” Beulah Marie Dix and Sada Cowan added action, fun, and scenes of both fire and ice to this now Americanized plot. The ads as well as title credit were correct when they advised viewers that Leonard Merrick’s story “The Laurels and the Lady” only “suggested” Fool’s Paradise. – Leslie Midkiff DeBauche