Carrie Beauchamp, a chronicler of early Hollywood women, has died at the age of 74
Carrie Beauchamp, the political consultant-turned-historian who documented the story of neglected women in early Hollywood, when the film industry’s chaotic beginnings allowed them to assert a surprising amount of power, died Thursday in Los Angeles. She was 74 years old.
Her son, Jake Flynn, confirmed the death at the hospital, but did not specify the cause.
Beginning with her 1998 book, “Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and Powerful Women in Early Hollywood,” Ms. Beauchamp set out to reclaim a lost part of cinema history, when women stood alongside men as much as men. The most productive and influential figures in the industry.
By searching the archives of the Library of Congress, Ms. Beauchamp discovered that about half of the films copyrighted between 1911 and 1925 were written by women, and that they produced and directed films that were seen by millions of people around the world.
However, with the exception of a few names, such as that of actress and United Artists co-founder Mary Pickford, most of these women and their accomplishments were erased by the male-dominated studio system that consolidated control over Hollywood in the 1930s.
Ms. Beauchamp’s path through the story is the life of Frances Marion, the screenwriter with more than 200 screenplays to her name, two of which — “The Big House” (1930) and “The Hero” (1931) — won Oscars.
Between the mid-1910s and the mid-1930s, Ms. Marion was the highest-paid writer in Hollywood, man or woman. However, until Mrs. Beauchamp came along, no one had written her biography.
“Women are always at the margins,” Beauchamp told The Christian Science Monitor in 1997. She went on to say that changing gender norms and the concentration of power in Hollywood by the end of World War II made the studios a man’s world.
“Rosie the Riveter went home,” she said, referring to the countless women who worked in factories during the war, “and so did the women who worked in the studios.”
Aspects of Lady Marion’s life paralleled Mrs. Beauchamp’s life. Both were well-known and beloved in the Hollywood of their day; Both were outspoken advocates of women’s rights; They both raised two sons largely on their own.
They slipped easily among the rich and famous. Lady Marion met actor Douglas Fairbanks and press baron William Randolph Hearst, while Ms. Beauchamp laughed with novelist Harold Robbins and actress Judy Balaban. Lady Beauchamp appears to have taken to heart one of Lady Marion’s most famous phrases: when asked why she did not marry, she replied that she was “looking for a man to look up to without lying down.”
Carol Ann Beauchamp was born on September 12, 1949 in Berkeley, California. Her father, Blake, a police officer, moved the family to nearby Stockton when she was six, and later worked in the insurance business. Her mother, Katherine (Crisp) Beauchamp, was an administrator at the University of the Pacific in Stockton.
She attended Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, California, then transferred to San Jose State University, where she studied political science and American history and graduated in 1972.
Ms. Beauchamp spent six years working as an investigator for the Legal Aid Society of Santa Clara County, while also becoming active in local and state politics.
She rallied for the Equal Rights Amendment; She was the first president of the California National Women’s Political Caucus, an advocacy group; In 1975, she helped manage the winning campaign of Janet Gray Hayes, the first woman elected mayor of San Jose.
This work brought her into contact with up-and-coming female politicians such as Dianne Feinstein, the future Democratic senator, as well as Jerry Brown, the governor of California. She became his press secretary in 1979, and over the next three years, she produced about 900 press releases, great training, she later said, for her future career as a writer.
Ms. Beauchamp continued her political work through the 1980s, even as her fascination with Hollywood and film history grew. She became a regular attender at the Cannes Film Festival, and in 1992 she and her friend, French journalist Henri Béhar, wrote Hollywood on the Riviera: The Inside Story of the Cannes Film Festival.
Her first marriage ended in divorce. She married Tom Flynn in 1992. They later divorced. She and her son Jake are survived by another son from a previous relationship, Theo Beauchamp.
Ms. Beauchamp wrote and edited several other books after her autobiography of Ms. Marion, including “Rediscovering Anita Loos: Processing Film and Fiction by Anita Loos” (2003), and “The Adventures of a Hollywood Secretary: Her Private Letters from Inside the Hollywood Studios.” The 1920s” (2006) and “Joseph P. “Kennedy: His Hollywood Years” (2009).
She has written regularly about Hollywood for The New York Times and Vanity Fair, and has also written a number of documentaries, including a film based on a biography of Marion that she produced, The Day My God Died (2003), about child sex slavery in 2003. India and Nepal .
Ms. Beauchamp has stitched a common thread through all of her work, an ultimately hopeful message that in the face of rampant sexism and even gender-based violence, women can often rely on other women for support.
“I owe my greatest success to women,” Lady Marion was quoted as saying. “Contrary to the assertion that women do everything they can to hinder each other’s progress, I have found that it has always been one of my own sex who gave me a helping hand when I needed it.”
