[7] Following their initial success on juvenile scripts for Withers and others, the two expanded into screwball comedy (Woman Chases Man, Keep Smiling), intrigue (International Settlement and While New York Sleeps) and happy hokum (Down on the Farm).
[8] During these years, Fenton could be found in one of three primary places: behind his typewriter, out on the town with his writer friends (often in the back room of Musso & Frank's restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard),[9] or on a golf course.
San Francisco book critic Joseph Henry Jackson included a chapter from the novel in Continent's End,[12] his 1944 anthology of California writing.
Again, The Los Angeles Times: Fenton has a deft facility in that most difficult of all the novel's techniques—the overlaying, underlying and intertwining of the many moods that go to make up life...The dialogue is marvelous, more right than Parker or Hemingway and more human.
The remainder of his print work constituted one short story in each of two early '50s science fiction anthologies,[16][17] two magazine articles[18][19] and an introduction to a quiz book.
[20] By 1950, Fenton was divorced from June Martel, had two children (a boy, Mark, and a daughter, Joyce) with his second wife, actress Mary Jane Hodge (whom he'd married on February 10, 1945, in Las Vegas, Nevada)[21] and was living in a two-story rural English home in the Cheviot Hills section of Los Angeles,[22] just down the street from the former California Country Club, where he was a member.
), William Holden (Escape from Fort Bravo), Mitchum, Marilyn Monroe & Rory Calhoun (River of No Return), Gary Cooper & Richard Widmark (Garden of Evil), Tyrone Power & Susan Hayward (Untamed), James Cagney & Barbara Stanwyck (These Wilder Years) and John Wayne (The Wings of Eagles).
Mary Jane Fenton filed for divorce in 1957,[23] and the near-constant shake-ups and re-organizations in the studio world had led to several announced writing projects being put on the back burner or simply being cancelled.
After completing several assignments for episodic series dramas (including six for The Virginian), Fenton's final script — the well-regarded Something for a Lonely Man — came in collaboration with an old friend: John Fante.
[26] In John Fante's Dreams of Bunker Hill,[27] the final installment of The Saga of Arturo Bandini, the author partially based a character on Fenton, a screenwriter named "Frank Edgington".