by Ellen Dawson
department in 1912 and “Greenroom Jottings: Little Whispering Room from Everywhere in Playerdom” in 1913 (“Vitagraph Stardom” 270). That same year Photoplay retitled their “Notes on the Players” section as “Photoplayers’ Personalities: Little Glimpses Behind the Screen as It Were.” It is relatively easy to see that the lure implied by “glimpsing,” “chatting,” or
“whispering” hints at an illusive depth, a phantasm of access to interiority that must be accorded a special place in the history of early stardom. But to claim, as deCordova does, that the “private lives of the players were constituted as a site of knowledge and truth” (98) raises serious doubts, insinuating as it does a rather naïve readership and overlooking entirely the playful and often ironic tones assumed by studio-originated publicity as well as the promiscuous replay of star materials in other media outlets.
In 1914, at the very moment that this “truth” about stars as persons allegedly crystallizes, for instance, the Fox Company introduced an unknown actress, Theda Bara, at a legendary press conference in Chicago. As Gaylyn Studlar explains in her chapter for this volume, the event “strained the boundaries of credulity,” participating in a “discursive context of skepticism”
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surrounding the industry’s systematic exploitation of stars by that time. Born Theodosia Goodman in Cincinnati, Ohio, the daughter of a lower-middle-class Jewish family, Bara shimmered into the limelight as a “well-known actress from Paris,” albeit one born not in Europe but “in the shadow of the Sphinx.” As Studlar recalls, press agents eagerly pointed out that their new star’s name formed an anagram for “Arab Death,” and she teases out an equally fantastic array of monikers that proliferated in fan magazines, newspaper articles, and studio publicity following Bara’s stunning debut in A Fool There Was (1915) as a sexually aggressive and destructive “vamp”: “The Arch-Torpedo of Domesticity,” “The Queen of Vampires,” “The Wickedest Woman in the World,” “Purgatory’s Ivory Angel,” “The Ishmaelite of Domesticity,” “The Devil’s Handmaiden,” and the “Priestess of Sin.”
Given the astonishing “humbug” surrounding Bara’s ascension to superstardom, might we not concur that the public’s desire to know more, to draw closer to the “real” self of the star, mingles from the very start with an equally passionate interest in the phenomenon of spectacular delusion?
Although not unique to film stardom by any means, the modern publicity stunt has distinctively American roots, largely pioneered by P. T. (Phineas Taylor) Barnum in the 1840s and 1850s. As cultural historian Neil Harris has shown, Barnum recognized that the curiosities, wonders, and freaks that he featured in his exhibits would not have been successful if they had not been extensively, hyperbolically, and fallaciously advertised. When audiences discovered they had been duped by, say, the “Feejee [Fiji] Mer-maid,” they expressed interest in what Harris terms an “operational aesthetic,” in the intricate means through which Barnum had engineered such spectacular deceptions (61–89). That Barnum’s capacity to entice and deceive became the crucial ingredient in his self-cultivated reputation as the “presiding genius” of American showmanship affords an intriguing “origins” for thinking about the formation of modern celebrity culture, not least because any legacy routed through Barnum returns us to the stage, specifically to Sarah Bernhardt, the Western world’s most prestigious theatrical diva at the turn of the century. “By adopting Barnumism,” argues theater historian Susan Glenn, “Bernhardt ushered in a new cultural phenomenon: the egotistical female artist who not only promotes her plays but actively constructs, exhibits, and advertises her own curious and flamboyant personality” (29).
Glenn’s exquisitely detailed account of Bernhardt’s widely publicized
“personality”—including repeated proclamations and recantations of her Jewish heritage, her noisy endorsement of the suffragette movement, and her passion for collecting exotic objects as well as lovers—is of inestimable
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import to histories of stardom in America where Bernhardt’s fame attained especially acute status in the press. In the most general and obvious way, the circulation of materials referring to Bernhardt’s personal life, and hence the public perception of an individual who transcends each performed role, interrupts the premise that film historians have long enshrined as the distinguishing mark of film stardom. Nor is it coincidental that Bernhardt appeared in several film versions of her stage roles, most famously Camille (1911) and Queen Elizabeth (1912). Billed as “features” or “specials”
imported from Europe, these two- and three-reel films circulated through innovative distribution strategies that highlighted a film’s ability to sustain audience interest as a single entity, rather than as one entry among many in a fast-changing eclectic variety program (comprising one- and split-reel films running ten to fifteen minutes in length) that formed the U.S. industry’s dominant mode of production and distribution in 1910–1912.
Whether or not these highly publicized and often imported “feature”
films—showcasing well-known stage stars like Rejane, Mrs. Fiske, James K.
Hackett, Miss Mildred Holland, and James O’Neill as well as Bernhardt—
represent the first moment that filmgoers knew they were “seeing stars,” as Janet Staiger argues, depends on how one understands the identity of those performers achieving recognition at the same moment as “picture personalities,” known only by virtue of their appearance in films (“Seeing Stars”
14–15). We return to this point momentarily, but it bears stressing for now that by 1913, as Elaine Bowser sums up, “the era of star exploitation was only just beginning: Theda Bara had yet to be invented” (119). More emphatic still, as Studlar reveals, the Fox company’s laborious construction of Bara as a decadent embodiment of feminine evil directly affiliated her star persona with the thespian credentials and sensual, orientalized, exotic roles of Bernhardt, whose 1916–18 U.S. tour of her stage role as Cléopâtre (in French) conspicuously coincided with the anticipated release of Bara’s epic film vehicle, Cleopatra (1917).
✩★
✩★
✩★
✩★
✩ Modern Womanhood
I have belabored the triangulated histories of Bara, Bern-
hardt, and Barnum in order to pry open a genealogy of celebrity culture in America ripe with balderdash, a sort of sensational ballyhoo eagerly consumed by a mass public intrigued with fantasies of rebellious otherness. I have also done so in order to foreground the close association of these fantasies with female performers who emblematized a defiant selfhood and formed an important crucible for modern feminism. It is in this spirit that
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Sarah Bernhardt as Cleopatra.
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Anne Morey and Kristen Hatch approach the feature film extravaganzas that respectively showcase Geraldine Farrar and Lillian Gish. In the case of Farrar, Morey highlights the opera-turned-film-star’s “ability to unite two apparently incompatible aims: she permitted film to make a claim for the upper-middle-class carriage trade at the same moment that she helped to domesticate a cadre of risqué ‘brothel play’ roles.” While only one of the fourteen films Farrar made with Famous Players in the second half of the decade directly adapted an opera ( Carmen, 1915), the majority reiterated a variation on the reformed or fallen woman theme, the ne plus ultra of prestige soprano roles since the nineteenth century. At first glance, the case of Gish might suggest Farrar’s dire opposite. As Hatch explains, the star’s blond hair, blue eyes, and pale skin embodied middle-class ideals of white womanhood onscreen, and her characters in film vehicles—almost all directed by D. W. Griffith—emit an ethereal and luminous innocence in a world threatened by interracial mixing, masculine brutishness, and the turmoil of war.
But Hatch shows how Gish’s offscreen persona increasingly undermined the
logic of her films. Fan magazines like Photoplay and Motion Picture Magazine marshaled her pale coloring and slender features into the image of a “cool”
and businesslike woman, a professional immersed in a serious study of the science of acting. In like manner, Farrar’s status as a professional actor, a woman dedicated to her work, anchored her offscreen identity to respectability, while her appearance in films enabled the widespread circulation of her sinfully exotic operatic persona. In both cases these stars helped forge, to borrow Hatch’s phrase, “a new vision of modern womanhood.”
Other female film stars became prototypes of a new physical culture, their identities constructed and supported by a discourse that promoted steady nerves and athletic prowess—a phenomenology of performance radically distinct from stage traditions in which the performers’ emotional range or acting skill attain paramount status. None were more visible than serial adventure stars like Pearl White, Grace Cunard, Ruth Roland, Cleo Madison, Kathlyn Williams, and Helen Holmes, whose global popularity flaunted the “modern girl” as a daring creature immune to the anxieties of urban culture, eager to experience the thrill of the unknown, and capable of feats that would put grown men to shame. As Mark Cooper reveals in his chapter on White and Cunard, a number of national industries translated and modified these icons of modern femininity, while U.S. fan discourse reveals a capacious appetite for playing with their offscreen identities, a jug-gernaut through which the meaning of the character appearing onscreen is intensified or rerouted. He draws attention, for instance, to the rhetorical strategies whereby a female reporter initially poses as a “naïve fan who mis-
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takes fiction for real life” and enters the “fearless” star’s home with trepi-dation, as if expecting the nefarious thugs populating serials like The Perils of Pauline (1914), The Exploits of Elaine (1914), and The Broken Coin (1915) to suddenly appear with knives, ropes, and perhaps even a poisonous gas or death-ray device in hand. “This is a ruse,” he notes: “The author playfully disavows her knowledge that villains do not infest the star’s . . . home in order to allow readers the satisfaction of believing they can tell the difference between fiction and real life.” In so doing, such interviews reveal
“what real life is and offers the star, rather than her character, as a point of identification.” But if we ask what “real life” means, then the answer shimmering through any number of interviews, publicity reports, behind-the-scenes photographs, and testimonials stresses the degree to which
“uncertainty and danger define [the serial stars’] daily routine.” In short, the labor involved in staging and performing the feats that appear onscreen surfaces in star discourse as far more risky, daring, and difficult than that represented by the fictional heroines.
The lexicon of physical risk was hardly idiosyncratic to serial stars. Interviews with Mary Pickford, as Christine Gledhill observes in her chapter here,
“often includ[ed] snippets about Pickford’s feats of endurance while filming, suggesting competition with her serial-queen rivals.” Other rivals included Annette Kellerman, the former Olympic swimming champion who became the Fox Company’s featured star in spectacular underwater fantasy films like Neptune’s Daughter (1914) and A Daughter of the Gods (1916), and, perhaps most notoriously, comedians like Mabel Normand. The era’s indisputable queen of comedy, Normand’s roguish personality and daring persona were first established in Biograph films during the picture personality era. In Tomboy Bessie (1911), for instance, she rides a bicycle sitting on the handle-bars, robs a chicken coop, and uses a slingshot, and in A Dash Through the Clouds (1912) she rescues her sweetheart by ascending in an open-door air-plane. By 1914 Normand featured as the leading female star and oftentimes as director at the Keystone Film Company, while publicity touted her as “one of the swimming champions of the Pacific Coast, an expert horsewoman, athletic, and fond of all outdoor sports to a degree which permits of her being thrown or dragged about in some of the more strenuous comedy work in a way that would put most women in the hospital” (“A Champion Swimmer Who Swims for Plays,” Blue Book Magazine, July 1914, n.p.). Most women, that is, but emphatically not female stars whose laborious physical exertion registered with innumerable fans, honored in tributes like “Mademoiselle Film vs. Mademoiselle Stage,” the award-winning essay of a 1914 write-in contest sponsored by Motion Picture Magazine. Written by Helen Mar of
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Annette Kellerman in A Daughter of the Gods (1916). Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Archive.
Rochester, New York, the subtitle of the essay headlines the question: “Are the Demands on a Film Actress More Exacting and Strenuous Than Those on Her Stage Sister?” The response, “Emphatically Affirmative,” is supported throughout the piece, leading the writer to assay her belief that “Mademoiselle Film” is entitled to “the high and loyal esteem in which she is held by us, the solid and discerning regiment of Film Fans” (August 1914, 128).
The vocal presence of female fans in the decade is commensurate with the rising presence of women in every facet of American life. Although the Nineteenth Amendment giving women the right to vote would not be ratified until 1919, statistics clarify that in the course of the first two decades of the twentieth century female enrollment in colleges and universities
“increased by 1000 percent in public institutions and 482 percent in private ones.” Women employed as “clerks, saleswomen, stenographers, typists, bookkeepers, cashiers, and accountants” soared from “9.1 percent in 1910
to 25.6 percent in 1920” (Ammons 82). “Never before in civilization,”
wrote Jane Addams as early as 1909, “have such numbers of young girls been suddenly released from the protection of the home and permitted to walk unattended upon city streets and to work under alien roofs; for the
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Mabel Normand, playing opposite Roscoe Arbuckle in He Did and He Didn’t (1916), demonstrates the daring athleticism that “permits of her being thrown or dragged about in some of the more strenuous comedy work in a way that would put most women in the hospital.” Courtesy of Photofest.
first time they are being prized more for their labor power than for their innocence, their tender beauty, their ephemeral gaiety” (Lant, Red Velvet 5).
It would be a mistake to romanticize the freedom of many such young girls, especially those who were among the fifteen million Italian, Jewish, and eastern European immigrants arriving in the United States between
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1890 and 1915. Providing a ready pool of “labor power” for sweatshop factories, teenage immigrants worked in unsanitary and often life-threatening conditions. A lack of familiarity with English may have prohibited many such girls from reading and responding to early fan discourse, but their presence in nickelodeon theaters has been amply documented, part of a broader recognition by recent historians that women increasingly composed the industry’s primary target audience through the course of the 1910s (see Higashi “Vitagraph”; Stamp; Fuller; Studlar “Perils”). “By the 1920s,” writes Antonia Lant, “popular wisdom had it that films were for women, and that they formed the majority of audiences. These regular filmgoers further shaped cinema’s fortunes in their buying of, and written responses to, film magazines” ( Red Velvet 1).
Women writers also shaped cinema’s fortunes in their capacity as screenwriters, a tradition including the prolific output of Sonya Levien, Anita Loos, Jeanie Macpherson, June Mathis, and Frances Marion. As Giorgio Bertellini recalls in his chapter here on the Anglo-American actor George Beban, whose performance as a sympathetic Italian immigrant in The Sign of the Rose (alternately titled The Alien), as well as in The Italian in 1915, drew from a picturesque imaginary of New York tenement life, female script-writers played an important role in altering common perceptions of oceanic migration and immigrant life. “While many of these stories hig
hlighted the trip to New York as a journey toward a better life, and represented social ties within the ghetto as less oppressive than those experienced in the homeland, these films often departed from the drama of immigration. They also repeatedly addressed issues germane to mainstream American culture by venturing, without pedantry, into questions of social freedom, sexual expression, and gender and interracial relations.” As Bertellini teases out, Beban played a prominent role in generating a sympathetic portrayal of immigrant “others” and creating a racialized star profile, the likes of which paved the way for the next decade’s notorious “Latin Lover,” the exotic and sensual Rudolf Valentino. He also reminds us that Valentino’s persona was discovered and profiled by screenwriter June Mathis in her scripts for Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921) and Blood and Sand (1922).
Perhaps even more critical for the history of stardom in the 1910s, women writers shaped cinema’s fortunes in their capacity as journalists and critics, preeminent among them Louella Parsons, Adele Whitely Fletcher, Colette, Kitty Kelly ( Chicago Tribune), Grace Kingsley ( Los Angeles Times), Alice Hall ( Pictures and the Picturegoer), and Mabel Condon ( Motography and Photoplay). As Richard Abel argues in his chapter on G. M. Anderson and the picture personality era, this genealogy arguably begins when Gertrude Price,
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a self-professed “Moving Picture Expert,” inaugurated a syndicated series of
“personality sketches” of popular film players for the Scripps-McRae newspaper chain in late 1912. Emphatically, Abel’s recovery of Price’s “personality sketches” reveals that the euphoria of proximity to film players’ personal lives circulates on a mass scale well before industry-oriented publications like Motion Picture Story Magazine and Photoplay indulged public curiosity. This revelation amounts to more than a mere fiddling with dates, since Price’s exposés in a vast newspaper chain that catered to the working class reveal two distinct emphases. On one hand, a distinctively modern fantasy dominates at least “two-thirds” of Price’s stories, all of which promote female players described as “athletic young women, carefree but committed to their work, frank and fearless in the face of physical risk. . . . [usually] unattached, and without children.” Such female “picture personalities,” Abel concludes,