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enduring another winter in frigid Helena. Della, Myrna, and babe-in-arms David Frederick took the train to San Diego, renting a house by the sea in La Jolla. There they remained through winter, spring, and then into summer. Della discovered that she loved both California’s sunny climate and its relaxed way of living. She felt no isolation because she had friends from Montana who visited and other friends who moved nearby. For the first time in her seven-year marriage she experienced the freedom of living away from her husband and found that she rather liked it. Myrna, too, found the seaside enchanting. In La Jolla she befriended a kindly old naturalist, Dr. Kline, who owned the local aquarium and taught her to catch eels and hunt for shells on the beach. 10
    David senior came to visit in August, in time to join the celebration of Myrna’s seventh birthday. The long sojourn in California, coupled with all the train fares, must have cost plenty, but there is no evidence that money was a major concern. At this point the focus was on Della’s health and on getting to know an alluring part of the world. During his visit David senior resisted Della’s entreaties to buy land in California, proclaiming himself a Montanan, by God ( BB , 17). He and Della evidently quarreled. She fervently wanted the entire family to relocate and tried to convince David that he could make a good living selling real estate in the Land of Sunshine, which was attracting hordes of newcomers. He wouldn’t hear of it, however, and dispatched his family to return home to Helena’s Fifth Avenue. They did so in time for Myrna to resume her schooling in Helena in the fall of 1912.
    Four years later, Della needed a hysterectomy, and she and the children returned to Southern California, this time to a shingled house in the Los Angeles area with a honeysuckle-strewn porch on Hart Avenue in Ocean Park, near Santa Monica. Across the street lived a friend who put them up when they first arrived. Della had persuaded David to allow her to undergo both the surgery and the convalescence in a healing climate. He indulged her by giving his reluctant consent. They remained long enough for Myrna, now almost eleven, to be enrolled in school in Ocean Park for several months and for her to take her first dancing lessons, which she loved. She formed a tight bond with a girl named Louella Bamberger (later called Lou MacFarlane), who lived next door and would remain a lifelong friend. Myrna, tall for her age, was already aware of boys and seemed quite worldly to the younger Lou. The two enjoyed Saturday afternoon dances for children at Ocean Park Pier. Myrna had taught herself the steps to popular ballroom dances, which she in turn taught her friend. At the Saturday dances Myrna and Lou would dance together ( BB , 19).
    Della recovered quickly from her surgery. Myrna remembered her mother enjoying parties, champagne, and the jazz orchestra at the Nat C. Goodwin Pier. Della didn’t seem to be pining for home, Montana, or her absent husband. Whatever passion once existed between Della and David, both still in their thirties, had by now subsided.
    Myrna did miss her father, and her beloved Johnson grandmother as well, but she flourished nonetheless beside the Pacific Ocean. While investigating barnacles beneath the pier, she got her first glimpse of movie stars cavorting at a private beach. The women wore bathing costumes with bloomers and tied their hair up in turbans. She viewed more actors at close range when Della took the children on a tour of Universal Studios, where they watched William Farnum (who would later appear with Myrna in A Connecticut Yankee ) “shootin’ it up with wranglers” under blue lights ( BB , 18). That same day they also watched Dorothy Davenport and Jack Pickford at work. But what most entranced Myrna on her first visit to a movie studio was the filming of a sequence “in which a small girl broke out of a fancy egg and danced exquisitely.”