by Ellen Dawson
“would have been especially appealing to young female movie fans as active, attractive, independent workers or professionals and, therefore, successful role models to emulate.” On the other hand, the prevalence of stories deal-ing with western subjects and the “good bad outlaw” character type embodied by Anderson’s “Broncho Billy” suggests that nostalgic fantasies of an America in which the pursuit of happiness depended on rugged individual-ism and the settling of an untamed frontier played a prominent role in the national imaginary fostered by early stardom.
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✩ Democratizing Fame and Magnetizing Bodies
“America,” writes Leo Braudy, “pioneered in the implicit
democratic and modern assumption that everyone could and should be looked at. This it seemed was one of the privileges for which the American Revolution was fought” (506). Whether or not we agree that a “democratization of fame” begins when Americans toppled Britain’s monarchical rule in the late eighteenth century, a pseudo-discourse of democracy, of opportunity available to all, attained governing status in early star discourse. Neither kings nor queens, gods nor goddesses, many stars were touted as resembling more ordinary people, just “like you and me.”1 They were our friends. It is telling, for instance, that in late 1919 reporter Randolph Bartlett virulently attacked the machinations of the “star system,” by which he meant the kind of publicity stunts geared to “create” stars in the manner established by Fox’s publicity department for Theda Bara. But he vocifer-ously defended the “star idea” that would sustain itself regardless of advertising ploys since “the principal interest of the majority of normal human beings is their friends. . . . So we are attracted to personalities upon the
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screen. No matter what they do, we are interested” (“The Star Idea versus the Star System,” Motion Picture Magazine, August 1919, 107).
The idiom of friendship emerged early. In January 1913, the New York Dramatic Mirror provided portraits of players as diverse as Florence Turner, John Bunny, Kathlyn Williams, Gene Gauntier, G. M. Anderson, and Alice Joyce, claiming that “the faces are as familiar as those of old friends and as welcome” (“Personality a Force in Pictures,” 15 January 1913, 44). If a good friendship takes time, then so too with early picture personalities whose weekly appearance in one- and split-reel films in rapidly changing variety programs across the country enabled “the spectator” to “gradually . . . know such a player as he knows a friend and the more complete the acquaintance, the more thorough the enjoyment to be gained from a film performance.”
The public’s “acquaintance” with these personalities was also shaped by production practices increasingly geared toward serialization, or what Abel in his study of G. M. Anderson calls the “seriality” of the “single-reel fiction film.” Known for western action films as early as 1909, Anderson’s role as
“Broncho Billy” in over fifty one-reel films produced between 1910 and 1913 demonstrates that “a series based on a recurring ‘picture personality’
who embodied a more or less consistent character ‘type,’ could successfully attract mass audiences to return again and again to picture theaters.” But repetition alone could hardly lure and attract. Moreover, as Abel quips, Anderson “would have been the first to admit that his range as an actor was limited.” Even so, his stocky, taciturn, tight-lipped performance as a “good bad man” generated “an unexpectedly strong screen presence,” a phenomenological appeal regularly referred to in the press as “magnetism.”
Although I can only touch on the array of semantic meanings attached to the concept of “magnetism,” its ubiquitous use in the period encourages a reorientation of the concept of “attraction,” a term widely associated in film historical discourse with a fin-de-siècle cinema’s technological prowess and the earliest moving-image machine’s euphoric proximity to modernity.
It bears stressing that stars would be marketed as the preeminent motion picture attraction in publicity and advertisements by the mid- to late 1910s, but the meaning of “attraction” in this context derives not from the spectacular lure of the fairground or the magic show. It stems instead from a tradition of philosophical and scientific assessments of the invisible forces affecting or linking spatially discreet material bodies. It is this invisible “contact” that Isaac Newton raised, by way of speculation, in the final query of his Opticks (1717): “Have not the small Particle of Bodies certain Powers, Virtues, or Forces, by which they act at a distance . . . ? For it’s well known that bodies act upon one another by Attractions of Gravity, Magnetism, and
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Electricity” (375–76, my emphasis). Newton’s theory of the invisible laws of gravity, in concord with the seemingly miraculous discovery of electricity by Benjamin Franklin and the more dubious but wildly popular theory of
“animal magnetism” proselytized by Franz Anton Mesmer in the eighteenth century, fed a western world’s fascination with the idea of invisible emis-sions that could literally “move” other bodies and things. In the 1820s, for instance, the German novelist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe formulated a theory of “attraction,” explaining: “We have all some electrical and magnetic forces within us; and we put forth, like the magnet itself, an attractive or repulsive power” (Asendorf 156). A belief in the electromagnetic fluids of the body pervaded most every philosophical, scientific, sociological, and artistic movement in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To take one curious and yet illustrious example, in 1913 the New York Times published a special cable from Paris, “Hands Are Magnetic Poles.” Here readers learned that a French scientist, M. Fayol, had built an instrument consisting of a “delicate metal cylinder” that “swings in a perpendicular position between ball bears” on an adjustable oak board that could measure the
“vital magnetic fluid emitted by the body” (13 April 1913, C2).
Less exacting devices tallied the magnetic appeal of film players. But it was generally agreed that “the most popular actors [in film] may not be the most skillful,” as Frank Dyer observed in 1913: “The popular actors seem to have the indefinable quality of taking a good photograph, and making appeals by reason of their inherent magnetism” (Bowser 106, my emphasis).
However “indefinable,” the logic that equates a player’s drawing power with the allure of “magnetism” prevailed in headlines such as “Personality—Box-Office Magnet,” as the New York Dramatic Mirror trumpeted in 1914, citing Kathlyn Williams, “Broncho Billy” Anderson, Flora Finch, John Bunny, and Mary Fuller among others as “examples of players with personality—individuality that has value, that is a magnet in the box-office” (14 January 1914, 52). That same year, shortly after the eighteen-year-old Blanche Sweet signed a contract with Famous Players–Lasky, one writer for Motion Picture News struggled to explain the “screen magnetism”
of her appeal. “The man doesn’t live,” he sighed, “who could watch a good Sweet picture without feeling a sense of her actual presence—without almost believing that he could touch flesh if only his hand could come in contact with the figure on the screen” (19 December 1914, 34). For those who did have the privilege of coming into contact with the figure on the screen, as when reporter Mabel Condon ventured to the Edison Company’s New York studio to interview Mary Fuller in the spring of 1914, “the first clasp of [Fuller’s] hand” appeared wholly explanatory. “There is magnetism
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in this experience,” Condon informed her readers, “and you continue to feel it long after” (“‘True Blue’ Mary Fuller,” Photoplay, May 1914, 61).
Arguably, the notion that certain personalities emit a magnetic charge capable of “touching” and “moving” others even at a distance may be the phantasm explaining the chiasmic relation between fans and early film stars, an electrifying proximity at once imaginary and li
terally felt. Insofar as “magnetism” simply belongs to a person, emerges from the shimmer of their very being, the concept synchronized neatly with a pseudo-democratic discourse encouraging the conception of film stars as “ordinary” folks—ordinary, that is, and yet exceptionally magnetic.
The underlying complexities implicit in such a discourse emerge sharply in Scott Curtis’s detailed study of Douglas Fairbanks, a star generally understood as one of the decade’s most magnetic personalities. In 1915, as Curtis explains, when Fairbanks left the stage to sign a contract with the Triangle Film Corporation, he was only one of approximately sixty actors that Triangle “wooed” from the stage in an attempt to build a company associated with prestige pictures. The project of making films “for the masses with an appeal to the classes,” however, failed miserably, in part because Triangle directors “found themselves relying on static long takes and sluggish editing” in order “to accommodate hyperbolic, mannered theatrical acting styles.” Fairbanks’s startling popularity, beginning with his first film vehicle The Lamb (1915), proved an exception to the rule, largely due to his “savvy cinematographic presence,” his willingness to adapt his persona to film, and a comedic wit that played to the film’s many “medium shots.” Fairbanks’s strenuous athleticism also enabled a rousing tempo that appealed to filmgoers, and Curtis neatly parses the mounting discourse through which the actor’s enthusiastic, rugged, and adventurous physical feats formed a synecdoche for filmic realism—a “real” associated with on-location shooting, a newly formed “Hollywood” frontier in the west, and hence an idealized American imago distinct from the civilized effeminacy of the east coast as well as the artifice of the Broadway stage. Ultimately, each of these representational and discursive techniques reinforced the “authenticity” and “magnetism” associated with Fairbanks. As Curtis puts it, Doug
“just plays himself.”
The state of simply being oneself, rather than playing a part, had far-reaching implications for the fledgling film industry’s promotion of their stars’ personal magnetism, and undoubtedly fostered fans’ sense of intimacy with their favorite players. In contrast to the elusive dignity associated with prestigious stage performers—such as Madame Sarah Bernhardt or Miss Maude Adams—the majority of film stars throughout the decade
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were known quite simply as “Doug,” “Charlie” (Charles Chaplin), “Mabel”
(Mabel Normand), “Pearl” (Pearl White), “Bunny” (John Bunny), or by monikers associated with physiological traits like “Fatty” (Roscoe Arbuckle) and “Dimples” (Maurice Costello). In the case of Mary Pickford, as Christine Gledhill’s shrewd analysis reveals, the simple appellate “Little Mary”
was “more than a studio brand name.” As she observes: “‘Mary’ generically designated ‘every girl,’ while ‘little’ encapsulated both her diminutive stature and ingénue roles. In combination ‘Little Mary’ Pickford encouraged identification of actress with roles—frequently also named ‘Mary’—making the star available for audience possession.”
Gledhill’s sustained scrutiny of the different meanings Pickford’s iconic stardom assumed when it crossed the Atlantic and developed in Britain frames the American embrace of a magnetic selfhood in sharp relief. While British commentators consistently hyped Pickford’s acting talent and oriented her wild popularity within a lexicon of theatrical traditions, the American press increasingly separated performer from role, inscribing the screen’s fairy-like, will-of-the-wisp, pathetic, wistful, charming, tomboyish, altogether lovable girl figure as an emanation of Pickford’s unique personality. What Gledhill terms the “mystery of personhood” at the heart of stardom, however, was promulgated on both sides of the Atlantic where audiences registered an intense, even overwhelming emotional cathexis to the “girl.” While the camera’s intimate probe of Pickford’s every movement and gesture afforded an illusion of proximity for the individual viewer, the cinema’s capacity to annul geographical and cultural difference generated another illusion of proximity, a sort of democratic incursion. The popularity of the girl with the “golden curls,” as Gledhill tallies, was “initially registered in numbers, computed in ‘millions.’” By 1914 those millions—both within the United States and across the globe—were understood as united in their common relationship to “Our Mary.”
The world’s familiarity with “Charlie”—or “Charlot,” as the French dubbed him—proved equally ubiquitous, and the comedian’s rapid ascent to global superstardom in 1915 competed only with that of Pickford and Fairbanks. Unlike “Doug” and “Mary,” however, Chaplin’s offscreen self—
the soft-spoken, decidedly “serious,” and even “shy” man busily immersed in his work—differed widely from the iconic “Tramp” figure he invented for the screen. A bit grotesque, and lacking the coordinates of geographical and cultural identity we so often associate with selfhood, the Tramp figure—
replete with baggy trousers, oversized shoes, bowler hat, short mustache, and limber cane—could be anyone. More to the point, anyone could be the Tramp, and an overwhelming number of men, women, and children tried.
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Dubbed “Chaplinitis” in 1915, the compulsion to imitate “Charlie” stunned a public for whom the very ideation of mass culture, as I argue, took shape through “Charlie’s” omnipresence in soldier barracks and on street corners, schoolrooms and dance halls, amateur stages and motion picture screens. It is hardly surprising that the undifferentiated appeal and near pandemic spread of a funny yet vulgar figure like the Tramp worried social commentators, among them Walter Pritchard Eaton, who decried what he perceived as a semi-hypnotic religious cult fed by “you worshipers of Charlie Chaplin” (“Actor-Snatching,” American Magazine, December 1915, 36).
Even as self-professed social guardians like Eaton lamented the magnetic power associated with film stardom, a fascination with American stars and the peculiar strength of the star-spectator bond developed in France where an emergent generation of film critics launched one of the first sustained attempts to grapple with the implications of the new medium and its peculiar species of celebrity. In 1916, the preeminent prewar music critic, Emile Vuillermoz, launched a biweekly column, “Devant l’écran,” in Le Temps. As Richard Abel clarifies elsewhere, Vuillermoz’s thinking followed two paths. One of them resonates with this discussion insofar as he believed that the camera “turned certain actors into ‘astral bodies’” whose essence was delivered up to the spectator in a direct, intimate, and profound encounter—“as absolute gift.” This intimacy was comfortable for the masses, Vuillermoz believed, because these stars became “‘friends’ to follow through different adventures” (“Photogénie” 108). At the same time, Vuillermoz became increasingly interested in the camera’s capacity to transform and reveal aspects of the world around us, including the very concept of self, an idealist position he shared in part with Louis Delluc, a young drama critic and novelist who became editor-in-chief of Le Film in June 1917 and who attempted to account for the phenomenon of the American film star in essays on Sessue Hayakawa, Charlie Chaplin, and William S.
Hart, among others.
In his chapter on Hayakawa, Daisuke Miyao takes a cue from Delluc’s lyrical rendering of the Japanese star’s intense screen presence as something other than “talent,” something that was a “natural force,” a beauty that was “painful”: “Few things in the cinema reveal to us, as the lights and silence of this mask do, that there really are alone beings.” Miyao’s aggressive reading strategy posits a rich tension between the American film industry’s laborious attempts to manage the meanings of the Asian body, to assimilate Hayakawa as an all-American and morally refined man on the one hand; and viewers’ sensational, phenomenological responses to the sheer carnal presence of the actor onscreen on the other. Ironically, the
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Japanese media, which refused to acknowledge Hayakawa
when he emerged as a sudden superstar following his performance as an Asian villain in The Cheat (1915), altered course as Hayakawa’s career flourished and his self-sacrificial characterizations in films like The Hidden Pearls and The Man Beneath elaborated tropes of sympathy for the Asian “other.” The ongoing idolization of the star in the western world encouraged the Japanese press, as Miyao concludes, to promote Hayakawa’s body as an emblem of what the Japanese body could become, if westernized, thus reinscribing a racial logic that Hayakawa’s films labored to explore and transcend.
Biology indeed proves a determining factor in early film stardom as it continues to be today. Quite frankly, democracy has never been all it is cracked up to be, as the conspicuous absence of African American, Native American, and Chinese American stars, or even the presence of racial and ethnically marginalized “magnetic” personalities, makes noisily clear. At the same time, curiously odd biological characteristics—like Ben Turpin’s perpetually crossed eyes and wildly engorged Adam’s apple—could enable a unique appeal. And Turpin, who deserves acclaim as arguably the first screen player ever named or discussed in the media (as early as 1909, according to Anthony Slide), achieved distinctive status throughout the decade, even among an array of clowns whose undersized, oversized, twitching, stumbling, pot-bellied, wand-like, adroitly clumsy, and altogether unusual physiologies determined the near surrealist and decidedly sensational antics of slapstick comedy’s finest performances in these years.