Veteran Hollywood screenwriter Lenore Coffee was born in San Francisco at the turn of the century. As a youngster she became enamoured with the arts, and particularly with the movies, which her parents also loved. She wanted to be an actress and rebelled against her father's urgings to become a writer by tearing to pieces all the poetry she had written. After her parents divorced she returned to writing, beginning her career in the advertising field.

In January of 1919, she answered an item in the back of The Motion Picture Exhibitors' Herald which advertised that actress Clara Kimball Young was in desperate need of a screen story. Having seen Young in several movies and impressed with her beauty, Coffee developed a story for her. In the process, she developed a method that lasted for the rest of her career: she would take a premise or concept that interested...