Lula was born March 7, 1889, according to her 1920s passport. Biographical sources give a later date, however. Her parents were William Sherman Vollmer, a machinist from Pennsylvania, and Virginia Smith probably from Hertford Co., NC. She was born in Keyser (later Addor), Moore County, North Carolina, just west of Fayetteville, timber country where her father found work; and she was sent to school in Asheville, North Carolina. Her parents later moved to Atlanta, and in 1910 Lula was a secretary and then auditor at the Piedmont Hotel, all the time writing short stories, plays, and a newspaper column. By the January 1920 census she had arrived in New York City and gave her age as 32, suggesting she was born in 1887. Lulu lived in Greenwich Village until her death. Throughout her life she shared apartments with other female secretaries and writers her age, eventually living for 25 years with Elizabeth Brown (Brownie). During her career, she worked in theater box offices and wrote plays, some of which were produced on Broadway in the 1920s.